What If School Were Optional? Utah Pol Calls For An End To ‘Compulsory Education’

Hey, parents. Would you still send your kids to school if it were completely optional?

Utah state Senator Aaron Osmond suggested recently that the education system is flawed for one main reason: School is a requirement.

“Some parents act as if the responsibility to educate, and even care for their child, is primarily the responsibility of the public school system,” he wrote. “As a result,” he continues, “Our teachers and schools have been forced to become surrogate parents, expected to do everything.”

As a result, Osmond calls for school to become optional. He doesn’t argue that kids should stop attending school altogether, but merely that all grades, from kindergarten on up, be elective.

His suggestion comes as an answer to the increasing reality of falling parental support for public education. Parents are more and more unsatisfied with the education system, and believe that schools fail to meet the individual needs of children.

So, Osmond says, “Let’s let them choose it, let’s not force them to do it.”

His optional school suggestion seems to serve as more of a critique of the soured relationship between teachers and parents rather than a genuine proposal. Though Utah education officials agree that the system isn’t perfect, some argue that the state must intervene where parents are unable or unwilling.

“We live in a society where some children require help beyond the ability of their parents,” said State School Board member Leslie Castle. “Those students don’t deserve to be punished, they don’t deserve to be disqualified.”

But Osmond doesn’t seem to think that parents will choose to not enroll their children in school.

“When the choice is available to them, they’re choosing kindergarten 92 percent of the time,” he said. “We have to shift the culture more than just the process.”

Therefore, his optional school argument implies that parents need to take more of an active role in raising their own children instead of relying on the state to do it, and then complaining when it doesn’t.

What do you think? Should school be optional? Do parents need to take more of an active role in the development of their children, or is it fair to expect the education system to do more in that regard?

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