The problem with public education as it exists in the United States right now is not only that it’s coercive, but that it is coercive on every level.

Firstly, it is coercive in that you have to attend. Unless your parents a) can afford the cost in time, money, and energy to take you out and b) choose to do so–you have no legal say in this decision–you are legally forced to attend.

Once you are in the school system, your schedule will be highly controlled. It will be decided for you at what times you may attend to basic bodily needs such as eating, drinking, sleeping, and using the restroom. You will have little choice in which people you get to interact with (overwhelmingly people in an artificially narrow age range), and which people you have to interact with (even if they are abusing you).

The subjects you will be learning will essentially be decided for you. The video “Don’t Stay In School” is an excellent takedown of how laughably arbitrary these subjects are. Which subjects you are interested in, feel ready to learn, or will be applicable to your particular life will very seldom be taken into account.

Once in the class, the way in which you learn the subject will be decided for you. You will probably be forced to learn the material via passively listening to lectures and performing repetitive exercises. You will have to participate in these activities or be punished via grading–the wrong grades will hurt your college prospects and may even prevent you from graduating from the only education system you were ever given the opportunity to attend. For the same reason, you will need to acquire, one way or another, the skills to pass tests that may not be suited to your abilities. You will have little room to pursue the aspects of the subject that seem most interesting or useful to you, and you probably won’t be able to access the material in the way that is easiest for you to process.

The way you will be forced to learn the material will likely extend to taking up many hours of your time outside of school, in which you otherwise might have been free to try to ameliorate the effects of all the above. Even if not, your time spent in school will likely leave you exhausted, with little energy to pursue your own education.

Reducing coercion at just one of these levels is still important progress. A government that offers real choice to students about what school, or none, they would like to attend would be progress; a parent who offers this same choice to one individual is also progress. A school that gives students a voice in deciding the curriculum would be progress; a teacher who refuses to hold grades over their students’ heads in order to force them to learn the material in a particular way is also progress. We’ve got a long way to go.