This may be the reason some people react with puzzlement when we inform them that we intend to homeschool our daughter. To most folks, good schools means schools that are safe, well maintained, well equipped, with competent teachers who actually help students learn, as measured by test scores and college admissions. This is why academic achievement, or the lack of it, is weak ground on which to make a stand for separating school and state. It doesn't hurt our cause that most government schools are failing, academically, on such a scale that families may start deserting them en masse . But whether or not SAT scores are rising or falling doesn't touch the heart of the problem.
Test scores flow from the schools' overt curriculum.
These were precisely the lessons that were being drummed into me thirty and more years ago. After Separation, there might still be schools that teach such lessons, for parents who want that. For my part, I want my daughter to learn to respect herself and others, but I don't think placing her in the institutional equivalent of a Skinner box is the way to do it. I'll just ask them to guarantee that she won't be taught any of Gatto's seven lessons there. That's a guarantee no one can make, as long as public schooling is synonymous with coercion.