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The concept of compulsory public schooling is wrong-headed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The film takes a look at public school education in America and concludes that schools are not only failing to educate, but are increasingly authoritarian institutions more akin to prisons that are eroding the foundations of American democracy. tudents are robbed of basic freedoms primarily due to irrational fears; they are searched, arbitrarily punished and force-fed dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. The educational mission of the public school system has been reduced from one of learning and preparation for adult citizenship to one of control and containment."

Consequences that flow from it, like random adults needing to surveil unrelated children all day via hidden means are also wrong.
http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
    But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
    Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree. "

We can have sympathy for all the people caught up in the madness, but it is still madness. Alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution...

As a starting point why not just give the money that goes to public schools to the parents of young children so the parents can spend more time with their children and also hire tutors and such? My essay on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...

But ultimately we need a basic income for all from birth, like John Holt talked about in "Escape from Childhood".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI

And also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8RulhBVzbk

So, if there is an answer to your question, it is because the school kid was already in a form of prison, and then he broke the written or unwritten prison rules, and he is now being further punished. What was the original crime that landed him in a day-prison called "school" though? Just being young? For alternatives, see: http://www.educationrevolution.org/

As New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto wrote:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
    Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. ...

That said, I liked your insightful and ironic point. As another poster replied, you made probably the best comment here.

Alternatives: http://www.educationrevolution.org/

From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
====
Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.

Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little Janey or mine.

Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane, having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the country, or the strange lady who lives next door.

I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal, Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves, sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what the words meant.

In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:

1. Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.
2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.
3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.
4. All the above.

You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?

If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of social engineering as the human imagination can conceive. What does it mean?

One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or anything significant about yo

"The three assumptions for home schooling are that it is inherently preferable for a parent to stay home to be there for the kids if they are needed, and that school as it is now is a negative influence the children who parents want to bring them up in a morale world. The third, and more controversial, is that 12 years of schooling is overkill. "

There is a lot more complexity to this than that, although you make some good points.

I'd rather see a "basic income" for all than paying people to be responsible parents, neighbors, or friends.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

Home-based and community-based education is often about reclaiming family and community from institutionalization.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

It certainly is true that unhealthy habits may get passed from kid to kid in schools (they are probably the easiest places to buy addictive drugs, for example). There are other addictive and unhealthy things passed on too at schools, even if they may originate elsewhere:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.chefann.com/
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077

But public school can be seen as inherently immoral in part because it rests on a premise of unneeded violence through coercion.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/

Contrast a "public" school with a "public" library, where many peopel throught the ages have learned a lot without someone grading them or monitoring everything they learned or forcing them to read certain books on a certain fixed schedule.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3a.htm
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn't tell me what to read, doesn't tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn't grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps m

Maybe it is more an "anti-violence" push? :-) http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/educating-children-in-a-violent-world/
"Lest you think I am overreacting when I declare that the means and methods by which nearly all of the children in this country are educated are inherently violent, consider what Webster's lists as its third definition for "violent": "caused by force; not natural, as in a violent death."
    Conventional education is all about force, beginning with each state's compulsory education statute. The failure to cover the state mandated curriculum, or its equivalent, is punishable by law. Even worse, students and teachers trapped inside schools that sort, grade, and rank children like fruits and vegetables face an increasing specter of punishment if the students don't measure up on mandatory -- and soon to be nationwide -- high stakes standardized tests. Students are told that, if they don't pass, then they can't move on to the next level. Teachers are told that, if their students don't pass, then it's time to look for another job. The indelible bottom line: learn or else. (Chris Mercogliano, past co-director of the Albany Free School)"

If the money is allocated to "education" then why do you consider it reasonable to exclude non-classroom (e.g. administrative) overhead? The fact is, divide the number of kids in NY in public schools by the amount spent, and it is about $20K per child per year. Administering a system where the money goes directly to the familes should have very little overhead. Personally, I'd rather see a more general basic income for everyone in the USA though on the order of US$2000 per month (about one half the US GDP), and then families could decide how much of that to allocate to educational expenses.
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/index.php

I agree we'll see 60% unemployment or worse (barring radical changes) fairly soon (due to robotics, AI, and free content on computer networks), but I don't think that issue is fixable by reforming public schools. Every country is going to see this, regardless of the school system. Some solutions besides a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html

I like listening to music. Here is what some people have to say about forcing other people to listen to music:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-02/news/31989906_1_music-groups-torture-prisoners-guantanamo-bay
"A new documentary released by Al Jazeera exposes the use of childrens songs and heavy metal music to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. "

I also like math... By analogy, what is forcing people to do math against their will?

You wrote: "I hated highschool..."

Then you wrote: "I have to ..."

Why do you have to perpetuate the system you hate?

I know there are answers -- the right to consume in our society is linked to participating in our current economic order. See: "The Triple Revolution Memorandum".
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/17/why-the-triple-revolution-memorandum-was-ahead-of-its-time/index.html

So, maybe you have to stay a school teacher for that reason. I certainly face the same economic issue myself regarding other paying work. And maybe you students are indeed better off with your approach in the context you describe, all other things being equal. So, then the issue is, how can one change the context so all other things are not equal and there is a rebalancing?

Still, either a universal basic income or the proposal I outlined would give families plenty of money to hire math tutors like yourself if their kids wanted to learn math. Or a basic income for everyone would mean you could do different things with your own time.

What you say from your experience is truth. But, you can still think more deeply and creatively about the meaning of it, like John Taylor Gatto, Jeff Schmidt, or John Holt did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(educator)

If all the kids you were teaching had freely chose to be in your class, would you have to think so much about authority? What would your day be like if the only kids you were interacting with explicitly wanted to be learning math or anything else you wanted to teach (like they wanted to be engineers or whatever)? The fact that there are children who are compelled to be in your classroom when they don't want to be there is a big part of the problem. Sadly, Jaime Escalante's efforts were essentially shut down by the school bureaucracy that could not accept them, so I'm not saying creating or sustaining alternatives in public schools is easy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante#National_attention

Khan Academy is one example of part of a different way forward. Free schools are another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school
http://www.sudval.org/

Or:
http://www.augusttojune.com/
"Come inside a public school happily and purposefully going against current trends and join 26 8-10 year olds, their teacher, and their parents for a year bursting with opportunities for curiosity, creativity and compassion. "

The last link, is a documentary about an alternative public school, so things are possible.

More alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/

More on this theme

http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Great points; thanks! That's why I feel we need something like a "basic income" so individuals and communities have the time and resources they need to bloom.

On competition and cooperation, from: http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
=====
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
    Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
====

Still, it is also true that male college students are of an age where competition for mates is a big deal, whereas older males at least tend more towards cooperation. But like James P. Hogan talks about in the sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", we can as a society at least redirect competitive urges into more socially productive ends.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

My main concern (in my sig) is that modern day technologies of abundance (biotech, nanotech, nuclear, robotics) make such formidable weapons (used to fight over perceived scarcity instead of to bring abundance) compared to the scale of the Earth that we need to create a more cooperative egalitarian society just to survive the 21st century. As well as move into space to hedge our bets. :-) And even currenltly materially wealthy individuals will be better off for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm

http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

Thus, this initiative. At least Canadian doctors realize a bit more the importance of vitamin D deficiency; keeping kids indoors even more during the summer is going to be terrible for their physical heath. Education serves multiple purposes -- to help an individual grow in human potential, to help someone become an informed citizen of good civic judgment, and also to learn some practical skills. School unfortunately focuses mostly on the last, and mainly in the context of shaping children to fit the needs of 19th century factories which mostly no longer exist. The most important "skill" is to be able to learn from real need and curiosity, and unfortunately that is stomped out of most children very early on because it would be too inconvenient for the school curriculum. Thus we then have the pathetic statements of kids in college saying they finally "learned how to learn", never remembering they were a "scientist in the crib". Keeping kids in school more will only mean even less of that most important "skill" will survive. See also:
"In Defense Of Childhood: Protecting Kids'' Inner Wildness"
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations. As Mercogliano explains, however, there is plenty that those involved with children can do to protect their spontaneity and exuberance. We can address their desperate thirst for knowledge, give them space to learn from their mistakes, and let them explore what their place in the adult world might be."

Public schools as we know them are going the way of the Dodo bird. Khan Academy is just one example of "learning on demand" as a larger trend I wrote about five years ago:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Pushes like these are just one last gasp of a dying system. Jerry Mintz talks about that here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/sustainable-education/

If we are to continue to have public schools, they should become a lot more like public libraries -- but at John Taylor Gatto points out, "public" means something very different in those two terms. See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon

As much as this New York teacher wanted this to be ironic, I can taste the truth in his words.

He wasn't being ironic. Shortly after being selected New York State Teacher of the Year he publicly resigned because he believed his profession was inherently harmful to children.

Then he wrote a book detailing the history behind the design of modern education

And such relationships can work both ways.

You've made an excellent argument for learning from knowledgeable other people with hands on experience about some area of interest, but, sadly, such people can only rarely be found in conventional schools...
    http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
    http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

And you ignore the other baggage professional teachers come with:
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

Why not just watch a video series instead, and ask questions online?
    http://www.learner.org/
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.explorelearning.com/

Of find some other alternative arrangement, including knowledgeable mentors among family, friends, or in the community?
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling

Is that really going to be that much worse than trying to learn from most "teachers" (who if you've ever been aroudn teacher training programs, you would see generally know little about math, science, and technology), as well meaning as most of them may be? The first thing most schools do is destroy a child's natural ability to learn and natural creativity:
    http://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Crib-Early-Learning-Tells/dp/0688177883
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U&feature=related

Here is an alternative funding model for hiring private tutors or having neighborhoods again where people have time to share their knowledge freely, based on just giving public school funds directly to the parents:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
   

Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome did not have compulsory education, were they not "advanced" for their time?

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) had no compulsory schooling as we know it hundreds of years ago, but the USA borrowed ideas from their society for its constitution.

The USA did not have compulsory education for most of the 1700s and 1800s. Was US American not advanced for its time? Was it perhaps in some ways more advanced back then, as Gatto suggests, with more independent self-educated people with a higher degree of literacy?

Anyway, another reply by someone else (who you may have confused with me?) makes a related point.

There are lots of better educational alternatives than compulsory mainstream public schooling listed here:
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Why not just give the money that now goes to compulsory schools directly to the parents to let them decide how to spend it on their children's behalf? A related specific proposal:
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

And if you say, you can't trust the parents to look out for their own children's interests, then what does that say about the value of thirteen years of compulsory schooling?

Anyway, there are lots of alternative ideas out there if you look around with an open mind. But the whole point of compulsory schooling is to close people's minds and distract them. That may not be the intentional purpose of most schoolteachers, but it is the end result of the systemic process, and as Gatto suggests, that process is doing exactly what it was designed to do, so if you give it more resources, it will only dumb people down faster and more comprehensively.

See also from a previous vice-provost of Caltech and a previous editor of Physics today that say related things:
    http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
    http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

People know how to do better: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
We don't for all sorts fo reasons related to social power (see John Taylor Gatto).

See also my essay on learning "on demand" instead of learning "just in case":
    "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html

Education can have several goals in this descending order:
* To help a person grow as a person
* To help a person be a good citizen
* To shape a person into someone elses' vision of a good consumer and good worker and, for a few, a good obedient professional with the "right" politics

Those three aspects of "education" are regularly confused, and usually most of formal schooling (especially when test-driven) has to do with the last of the three which is often at odds with the first two.

See also for how the third aspect goes on into grad school:
    http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools by Peter Gray; In an experiment, children who were taught less learned more. ... The school that Kenschaft visited happened to be in a very poor district, with mostly African American kids, so at first she figured that the worst teachers must have been assigned to that school, and she theorized that this was why African Americans do even more poorly than white Americans on math tests. But then she went into some schools in wealthy districts, with mostly white kids, and found that the mathematics knowledge of teachers there was equally pathetic. She concluded that nobody could be learning much math in school and, "It appears that the higher scores of the affluent districts are not due to superior teaching but to the supplementary informal 'home schooling' of children.""

See also:
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

And some posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):
* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")
  http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.htm
* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)
    http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

For the record, I've always loved math and think it can be a very fun and worthwhile profession or hobby. I love broccoli too, but forcefeeding endless amounts of it to people till bursting despite the tears and protests would be cruel and probably would result in them not eating broccoli when no one was looking. How do we get people to enjoy thinking well and eating healthy? Good question. But people do have answers, if you look.
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

which is dumbing us down: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
Give them more money, and as NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto says, they will only do that job better... We need to change the whole paradigm...
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
http://www.holtgws.com/
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html

These posts of mine lead to endless links about what is wrong with the current schooling system at all levels:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

But key ideas can be found at these links:

      "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
      http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

      "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
      http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

      "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream" by Noam Chomsky
      http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm

      "University Secrets:Your Guide to Surviving a College Education" by
Robert D. Honigman
    http://web.archive.org/web/20060707100524/www.universitysecrets.com/us.htm
    http://web.archive.org/web/20060710145531/www.universitysecrets.com/table.htm

      "The Kept University"
      http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm

      "We're NOT Off to See the Wizard: REVISITING THE IDEA OF COLLEGE"
      http://unconventionalideas.wordpress.com/?s=wizard

      "The Underground History of American Education" by 1991 NYS Teacher of
the Year John Taylor Gatto
      http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm

      "In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness " by Chris
Mercogliano, who spent thirty-five years teaching at the Albany Free School
      http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm

And there are many more I link to in the posts, but these are starting points.

It would take years to read through all the references I link to in the three posts (and it has. :-)

AERO is one place that catalogs most of the alternatives:
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://disciplinedminds.com/
http://www.educationrevolution.org/

Related stuff with more links (my me):
"College Daze links"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
"The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
"Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student
protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html

Why aren't you homeschooling/unschooling then?
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

If you "saw the spark in these kids eyes extinguished" why not move to somewhere less affluent (cheaper) to live if you have to so you can make homeschooling work? Why pay so much taxes for "good" schools that are really just fancy prisons?
    http://www.thewaronkids.com/
And often lead to a lifetime in fancy prisons?
    http://disciplinedminds.com/

See also:
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

But if homeschooling absolutely can't work for you, see also AERO, the Alternative Education Resource Organization for lots of other possibilities that don't kill off creativity so much:
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/

(From a parent in a family that has given up a bunch of material stuff to homeschool and hopefully keep that spark alive...)
   

Babies are born knowing how to learn; people only need to relearn that if it has been stomped out of them, as is done through most conventional compulsory schooling. This is not to disgree that college can also be an effective filter for businesses to use to obtain compliant workers who know certain basic skills and who also are unlikely to seriously challenge authority. Related links:
    http://ilabs.washington.edu/news/scientist_in_the_crib.html
    http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
    http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

According to the US Department of Education, total money spent on K-12 schooling annually in the USA has risen from US$248.9 billion in 1990 to US$536 billion in 2005. How can an enormous industry (which is what K-12 schooling is) with a huge influential union be in dire straits when often is the main source of jobs in rural areas?

As pointed out in this article (based on a recent bipartisan study):
    "To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
for all the money (and technology) increased over that time per student, test scores (for what they are worth) have remained flat.

The problem with most K-12 schooling is not money (or technology); it is that K-12 schooling is actually very good at doing what it was designed to do (see for example John Taylor Gatto's writings).
      "The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
      http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Unfortunately what compulsory schooling was designed to do one hundred years or more ago (make people into compliant assembly line workers) is not really what an information age society needs anymore.

That's why efforts like by the Shuttleworth Foundation
    http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
to make some of the sort of software you are asking about for schools is misguided IMHO. You can't fix a bad process producing undesireable outcomes by automating it or reducing its cost. You need to change it entirely.

Here is one of many groups devoted to rethinking education:
    "The Alternative Education Resource Organization"
    http://www.educationrevolution.org/
And a related article by the leader of that organization:
    "Sustainable Education "
    http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?newsl etterid=21&articleid=195
He writes: "Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the "testing" push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can't think "out of the box," the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and "teaching to the test," in other words, more of the same. The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked "none of the above" and have decided to home educate."

Once you make the leap to a new process for education (primarily learner self-direction) *then* we can talk about what software makes sense to support the learner (like educational simulations, design tools, plain old access to the web, edubuntu,
    http://www.edubuntu.org/
and so on).

I have a younger brother (4th or 5th grade) in a virtual charter school currently. It seems to be working out for him even better than I would have thought. My mom has always been pro-homeschooling, and as others have said my observation is that the cyber model really does seem to build on that. They love the flexibility of having a fixed curriculum but also being able to build on it themselves, as well as being able to do the computer-work at any time of day (often at 11PM! sheesh.) Though, it also does seem true that some (not all) kids really need the support of a parent (or just another party) to work with it. There's another component to his school, however. The have a "Center for Performing and Fine Arts" which is an optional program (You can use their cyber program without enrolling in the arts center.) This, I think is the other key to what's really working well for my brother. Having someplace to go (and be creative!) two days a week breaks any monotony. As a completely aside, I would like to recommend to anyone who's interested in "Alternative Education" A. S. Neill's book Summerhill. It's written about a democratic school very much like the one I attend today.