Arizona Lawmaker Proposes Abandoning Compulsory Education

Published May 3, 2017

An Arizona lawmaker says society might value education more if we weren’t forced to attend school. The Arizona Daily Sun reports:

Rep. Paul Mosley, R-Lake Havasu City, questions whether any parent should ever be forced to send a child to public school, at any age.

Mosley, who attended public schools and has a bachelor’s degree in business management, said he’s not anti-education. But he told Capitol Media Services the current system of forcing children to go to school and forcing their parents to send them there is not creating a better educated society.

“Do you know what our dropout rate is?” he asked when queried about his position. “One of the highest in the world.”

And Mosley said Arizona, with more than 40,000 people behind bars, has among the highest incarceration rates in the world.

“And we spent $1.1 billion every year,” he said. “So how’s compulsory education working for us?”

More to the point, Mosley said he believes there’s a nexus between compulsory education and incarceration.

“Maybe we’d value the actual free education that the state offers to the children of Arizona,” Mosley said, with the students who are in schools voluntarily more interested in learning what they can.

I’m with Mosley on this one, but something tells me his “don’t make kids go to school” campaign isn’t going to get far. Teachers unions already blow a gasket every time someone suggests simply not forcing kids to attend a public school, let alone no school at all.

SOURCE: Arizona Daily Sun


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