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Well, yes. Because in order to effect mass education of the entire nation government is generally required to be involved.
I think it's really easy for us to question the necessity of mass education. But I also think it is important to remember that this was not simply imposed onto us from above. It is something which had to be fought for. The need for an educated workforce and the need for literacy as a life skill came before any serious government involvement. And when that involvement began it was highly controversial.
Speaking just for Britain, as I am less familiar with what was happening over in America at this time, the early moves to ensure educational opportunity to poorer families (education, incidently, being one of the areas that Adam Smith suggested was an appropriate place for government intervention and even if necessary provision) were something opposed by many on the right as being unnecessary, and likely to make for an unhappier (less obedient) and less settled workforce.
Polemic battles were fought against acts requiring parishes to ensure some sort of education provision was made available. Reading, it was suggested, bred insurrection and unhappiness in the lower orders. What need had they for such things? Theirs was not a world of literature, but of looms, ploughs, hammers and nails.
I have a lot of problems with the education system as it is. The idea of a massified and uniform approach to something as fluid and invidual as learning seems clunky and inadequate. And the insistence on attendance, coupled with sanctions against children and parents for non-compliance seems heavy handed. A one size fits all system is never going to answer the whole question of teaching and learning.
But. Wherever education is left to the private sector it fails or completely barrs the lowest economic strata. Where education is not mandated, gender inequality becomes much greater. It was only in my mother's generation that if a family had enough money to send one child to college and university they'd almost always choose the son, because girls left work when they got married. Without mandated education families forced to choose which children were educated would make a calculation based on many such factors. Such is the way of it in some countries now.
Parents are just people. They know their individual child better than anyone. But they are no more or less likely to make good decisions than anybody else.
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