The whole notion of divorcing children from their parents has its roots in public schooling, and American public schooling was the creation of our forebears, who mistakenly imagined that the future populations would largely resemble them.
Public schools in the USA date back to the 1640s, at which time church leaders began passing laws requiring communities above a certain size to establish schools and to require attendance. The colonies at this time were theocratic dictatorships and many of them were thoroughly communist; no private property, including land ownership, was permitted. (Prohibition of land ownership was the primary cause of the starvation in both Jamestown and Plymouth following their first winters; the colonies eventually solved their food problems by granting farming leases to their members and ceasing to feed everyone from a common store. See "A Lesson in Communism from our Two Earliest Colonies" at https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/a-lesson-in-communism-from-our-two).
The public schools at the time were extensions of the churches and it was implicitly understood that public education was firmly under control of the pastors and always would be. Thus, from their inception, the public schools have always been instruments of ideological indoctrination by whoever controlled them. So long as the population consisted of the first generation of religious idealists who had emigrated expressly to freely practice their uniform ideologies this worked out fine. But as the population diversified, beliefs about what should be taught also diversified. The intent of the naïve people who created the schools was to forever promulgate their own beliefs, but what they actually accomplished was to create a centralized instrument for the indoctrination of children by whoever could gain control over the public funding. So no, public schools have never been a good idea. https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/massachusetts-passes-first-education-law.html
The whole notion of divorcing children from their parents has its roots in public schooling, and American public schooling was the creation of our forebears, who mistakenly imagined that the future populations would largely resemble them.
Public schools in the USA date back to the 1640s, at which time church leaders began passing laws requiring communities above a certain size to establish schools and to require attendance. The colonies at this time were theocratic dictatorships and many of them were thoroughly communist; no private property, including land ownership, was permitted. (Prohibition of land ownership was the primary cause of the starvation in both Jamestown and Plymouth following their first winters; the colonies eventually solved their food problems by granting farming leases to their members and ceasing to feed everyone from a common store. See "A Lesson in Communism from our Two Earliest Colonies" at https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/a-lesson-in-communism-from-our-two).
The public schools at the time were extensions of the churches and it was implicitly understood that public education was firmly under control of the pastors and always would be. Thus, from their inception, the public schools have always been instruments of ideological indoctrination by whoever controlled them. So long as the population consisted of the first generation of religious idealists who had emigrated expressly to freely practice their uniform ideologies this worked out fine. But as the population diversified, beliefs about what should be taught also diversified. The intent of the naïve people who created the schools was to forever promulgate their own beliefs, but what they actually accomplished was to create a centralized instrument for the indoctrination of children by whoever could gain control over the public funding. So no, public schools have never been a good idea. https://www.massmoments.org/moment-details/massachusetts-passes-first-education-law.html
Let's get into the legal matter of privacy for minors. The schools are monkeying around with parental rights in the name of privacy.