[fideloper]

Our kids were too young for school during the pandemic (thank god, it seems like it really messed up kids lives).

Now they're both in early-years of school. Attendance is kinda interesting!

We parents EXTREMELY want the kids to go to school as it's the much-needed break to get our own work done - both in basic upkeep of our lives/household, and in our careers. We need the school hours to be long. Longer than they are, in fact. (As a side note, my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess? wtf? Have you met children before?)

On the other hand, life is expensive. Being restricted to only travel during the most expensive times to travel (around school holidays) isn't ideal. We can work with our kids to make up lost school time.

I also just don't like this third party entity whose value seems to go down every year to control our lives!?

Teaching (from the teachers point of view) increasingly is geared towards meeting metrics that are divorced from the needs of the kids. The teachers incentives are being misaligned with ours.

Additionally, I think we've (royal we) grown distrustful of public school in general. Not in a "big government" sort of way, just that we need to acknowledge that US public schools are designed for conformity. Being different (e.g. having ADHD, or being "on the spectrum") is not tolerated well - you might find your kid in a special needs bucket that effectively segregates them into programs that might not fit their needs at all.

At the same time, private school costs are huge and often the ones closest to you come not only in an extreme monetary cost a culture cost - being overly religious, or not religious enough (YMMV).

So, yeah, it's hard to really want or care to "be a model citizen" to the public schools that are increasingly putting up the pressure on parents (that's a whole other topic, why aren't grandparents capable of being helpful any more? where did our support networks go?) while standards that might be outside of the school's control are lowering their ability to give quality education.

(Also, pay the f*&king teachers, maybe!?)

[loudmax]

Absolutely this.

For so many reasons, we need a well functioning public school system. Where "well functioning" means serving various needs of both children and parents. All children.

The importance of education is something that liberals and conservatives actually agree on. But like so much else, it's become a pawn in the culture wars, so that the most dissonant voices at the fringes drown out the common sense concurrence in the middle.

[kwhitefoot]

> my kindergartener only gets like 20 minutes of recess

What? In Norwegian kidergarten (barnehage) there are no formal lessons at all. The whole point of barnehage is to turn young animals into cooperating members of society not to teach them mathematics and reading, that comes later.

So the whole day is some kind of play time with intervals of helping to lay the table for lunch, having stories read to, going for walks in the woods, and a hell of a lot of playing outside in the rain, snow, mud, climbing, falling, etc.

And also it is the most effective way to teach a language. My English speaking children were able to speak Norwegian from a standing start at three years old within six months and indistinguishable from the natives within a year with no classroom instruction at all.

[jhbadger]

In part because the US has created "pre-school", which children attend for a year or two before kindergarten. This is more like the traditional kindergarten that you describe -- it is intended to get kids to learn to get along with each other, play nicely, sing songs, etc.

[bombcar]

This is 100% it right here. When I was young, kindergarten was preschool (sometimes actually called that) and was also not mandatory. You could start school in first grade, and some schools didn't even have kindergarten.

Now preschool has standardized tests (!!!!!) and expected outcomes and kindergarten is worse. And 3K has been invented to be what preschool (and before that, kindergarten) once was. Of course, you can't go to 3K or 4K if you're not potty trained, which puts additional time crunches and restrictions on things.

Maybe it helps overall, but I'm not entirely sure it does.