The problem I see with our country is that we have lost the capability to delay gratification….

[Trillo]

31. We agree that school is work.

But that's about where our agreement ends. My own personal experience of K-12, which was composed of a mix of public and private schools, was that both school types were places were "cruel and unusual punishment" were considered normal and daily routine. I found this to be much less an issue in community college, but even there, the system is designed so that the police reign supreme, and consider a professors word superior to a students. In a greater sense, beyond my own personal realm, we see this in the recently maced UC students peacefully petitioning for a redress of grievances.

As far as literature is concerned, I used to agree with you. However, I now also realize that learning to read is yet one more method of funnelling money to a very few, large, corporate publishers, and thereby further enabling the corporatist structure. If my wife writes 7 books, corporate is not interested in publishing them, even though corporate magazines of the 1980s claimed (falsely, they lied) that getting published was as easy as completing a novel. When she self published after some zillions of rejections, ten years later along comes JPMorgan who took over our bank to decide our business account needs to be charged roughly $17 per month (it had been free), when the income coming into the account is roughly $10 per month. So, that's the end of my wife's publishing career. By all copyrights, she should be allowed to collect her $10 per month of royalties, such a meager sum, but nooo, such things as any small amount of royalty money are the sole domain of 147 super-connected corporate entities with ownership tentacles everywhere. Only they may collect royalties for authors on their personally chosen list.

My wife taught me an extremely important lesson. Hard work persisted over long periods of time does not pay off. I myself never had that kind of long-term persistence, and there was always the question regarding whether persistence does work when intelligence and education are lacking.

Nope, learning to read may have been a good idea at one time, but now it just enables another consumer commodity. I have 8 feet of cookbooks on one of my bookshelves. Yet, I never learned to cook (I mean "engineer" recipes) due to the volume measures that were designed to confuse the mind and skew the intuitive understanding of ratios. I started using baker's percentages, when I learned of them around 2006 or thereabouts. Well, come to find out, they were designed before 1939, when the U.S. government published them in their training manual, Army Baker. So much for the idea of "build a better model to obsolete an old one" that was so in vogue a decade back. Corporate successfully prevented the inclusion of "parts per hundred" in those 8 feet of cookbooks I collected, even though parts per and measure by weight were relatively common prior to The Boston Cooking School Cookbook.

In a corporatist society, it appears the motive of the corporations is to pay the workers the least amount of money they can, and prevent them from learning anything of practical, everday value. If it has value, it needs to be concealed, protected, and disinformation spouted loudly to confuse.

Compulsory school historically became a mass U.S. phenomenon, according the histories I've read, shortly after the second industrial era (typified in my HS classes by Henry Ford, which puts it in the time span of the OP's), when it was asserted that factories (can be read as the corporatist class) needed schooled folks who could follow the directions of others. Some decades later, our society changed from a manufacturing-based to a service-based one. The compulsory schools, established to create factory workers, continued.

The idea that anyone should be forced to work for free, specifically distinguished from volunteering or choosing to work for free, is consistent with the concept of corporations paying workers less than they pay themselves. After one gets out of high school, one is qualified to work for minimum wage only. While we all know minimum wage is not enough to live without working in excess of 70-80 hours per week and creatively sharing living expenses, for a former student to move from a compulsory school system where work was demanded and not monetarily compensated, into one where minimum wage was paid post high school, probably feels better to most people who worked for free for 13 prior school years, even though it's not enough to survive on, "Well, at least we're getting paid now".

So, the idea of not paying students for their work in school is quite simply consistent with the idea of corporatists parasitizing workers. Because minimum wage is not enough to live on, some choose to continue with higher education, so they can live more comfortably. They are saddled with debt, forcing them to in turn parasitize anyone they can when they're later working, to pay off this debt, and clearly explains why student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. This manipulative financial structure is severely skewed from the generalized ideas expressed in our governments founding documents regarding liberty and pursuit of happiness. The financial structure has essentially forced the more educated to take daily financial advantage of the less educated.

In my own personal life, I could not bring my children, whom I love, into this system of compulsory work-for-free where "cruel and unusual punishment" daily reigns supreme. The same "cruel and unusual punishment" which my parents were unable to protect me from, I similarly do not expect I could protect my children from. Perhaps it's different if ones parents are lawyers, but far from all parents are so endowed. Thus, I could not have children, even though having children is possibly/probably one of the joys of being human (pursuit of happiness). I love my children, thus I will not choose to bring them here.

How did those corrupt institutions, in particular a private military academy, so manipulate me to make these choices? There is no other choice, for me, available, as I love the children I won't bring here so very much.

Freedom is not being forced to work for free. Freedom is not being tricked daily by a predator class.

My experience of adult life is that we have evidently created a system where the more educated prey routinely, every day, on the less educated. This is the essence of today's class-based system as enabled by corporatism. The people themselves are fine. When they group in a corporation as employees, their job becomes one of enacting the top predator class's policies (CEOs and their boards of directors). We already know these top people are generally psychopaths, 800-1 pay versus their low-paid workers is all we need to know to make that judgement.

Freedom is not being forced to work for free; and being created equal, as our Declaration of Independence asserts, is not enabled by a corporatist system such as ours.

Even in school the emphasis on testing and trick questions carefully constructed, reflects a mechanism of the mostly highly educated trying to trick and fool the less educated. Freedom is not being fooled daily by an intellectual class. Freedom is not being forced by the state to endure endless hours of bullying for 13 school years on end.