Helping raise kids well is what parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, village, tribe, churches of the better sorts, and extended community are for... We got along fine without compulsory schools up until the last 150 years or so...
So kids don't have to go it alone -- except, perhaps, that other forces in our society have greatly damaged parenting, family life, community and village life, and so on, making it harder for them to help kids grow well.
Just one example related to the problems cause by two-income families:
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
"As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi note in their book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, having a child is now "the single best predictor" of bankruptcy.""
For the beginnings of compulsory schooling in the USA, which Gatto said had to be enforced at gun point:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
"In the US, the American Commonwealth of Massachusetts was the first state to pass a compulsory education law which occurred in 1852."
Or, on the problems of compulsory schools from another perspective:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"During this time, American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on early childhood education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores published their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[12] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement".[12]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long-term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting.[12] Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children, particularly special needs and impoverished children and children from exceptionally inferior homes[clarification needed], they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting. They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children -- when obviously most children already have even more secure housing.""
As for video games, I agree excessive screen time is problematical for any kid, but maybe we should make better (more educational) ones if kids like them so much? Again though, helping maintain a healthy balance is part of a larger social responsibility. Unfortunately, there is little accountability for people creating "supernormal stimuli" and all too many incentives to addict people to unhealthy things (whether games, food, videos, drugs, gambling, "therapy", or whatever). Some of the smartest minds in our society are paid some of the highest dollars to figure out ways to get kids to buy unhealthy crap to make more profits for those with a lot of capital. That is a tough force to put against a kid, even with parental supervision. Is it no wonder so many kids succumb? Perhaps this is part of a definition of "evil"? And it relates also to media deregulation that started under Carter and accelerated under Reagan. See the book "The War Play Dilemma" which talks about the unholy alliance of media producers, toy manufactures, and fast food makers who saturate kids 24X7 (even on their bedclothes) with stereotyped images.
Also, and I say this as someone who (along with his wife) put more than six person-years into writing an educational simulation in the 1990s, there has been precious little real support to make quality educational software -- unless it is tightly tied with raising children's grades in compulsory school, and even then still weak. There are exceptions (Kerbal Space Program? Khan Academy? Minecraft by accident? Space Engineers? Concord Consortium?), but overall, very little support relative to the need or desire to write such software. Still, it's true that more recently, there have been many good educational apps for cell phones and tablets, so some things are improving there, although I doubt most of these app makers are making enough money to support themselves (even if a handful no doubt do quite well). And then, on top of that, many granting agencies allow the few educational grant winners to make their works proprietary, this making them hard to build upon.
Most of the money for "Education" in our society gets sucked up by the compulsory school system or things closely linked to it. In New York State, an average of about US$20,000 per year is spent per compulsory schooled child. Just a fraction of that could otherwise pay for a heck of a lot of educational software and other educational materials for all under FOSS licenses. Think Khan Academy times 1000! And with that material being useable globally.
Also, US kids are unduly stressed from being forced to go to compulsory school, from the changes in cultural patterns preventing outdoor play (read "Last Child in the Woods" on "Nature Deficit Disorder") and interacting with neighboring kids, as well as other family stresses in the stagnant US economy (stagnant or declining take-home wages for decades for most workers, while expectations rise) which prevent parents and relatives and so on from spending more time with kids. These all contribute to an unhealthy environment that makes video games more appealing.
As a stereotype, how many adults come home from an overly stressful day at work and then turn on the TV and have a beer? So, kids come home from an overly stressful (even if just from boredom) day at school and play video games. Maybe the issue is more the nature of the workplace or the school?
Again, "The Moores published their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally and even physiologically." Think of it this way -- why should any parent be forced (at gunpoint) to allow his or her young child be adopted essentially by a state-selected single mother who already has twenty kids of the same age? But that is essentially the system we have now, although the "adoption" only covers most of a kid's waking weekday hours. So, we've got all these kids who according to research are damaged in all sorts of serious ways by compulsory schooling before age twelve, where their well-meaning school teacher "adoptive parent" has next to no time for them as one out of twenty or so other kids, and we then wonder why kids can't manage their own time or life well during or afterwards? Or why kids turn to video games or whatever including illegal drugs to deal with the stress or other resulting problems?
How did we let it get this way? Yet as Gatto says, every step made a sort of rational sense by itself...
http://www.homeschoolnewslink....
"A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, an historic part of the American genius. School had instead to train them for their role in the new over-arching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory-schooling."
BTW, if we are going to have schools, either the Albany Free School model (focusing on play and social/psychological development) or the one room school house of multiple ages all together (with older teaching younger, starting around age 10 or so, lasting a few years) makes a lot more sense and historically shows a lot more success at raising capable people for a democracy. However, better than all that for most of the time is parents and a local village with enough time to raise kids well...
To be clear -- I'm not against kids going to classes if they want, or kids hanging out with other kids of the same or different ages when they want, or making all of that tremendously easy to do -- including by putting 10X more money into our local public libraries for a start. I'm not against the state taxing the public and transferring money to families with kids to help the families and kids. I'm also not against parents choosing a private school for their kids if they want to do that and do other work instead. The issue is the compulsion and the state deciding instead of the family deciding what kids do during most of the day. Part of that issue is also the state instead of the family taking that US$20,000 a year and deciding how to spend it -- with, exaggerating but not much, the state generally choosing to spend it to support essentially single mothers with twenty same-aged kids.
For a family with two kids in New York State, that US$40,000 a year otherwise spent on compulsory school could allow one parent to stay home full-time with the kids, or could support world travel, or could pay for tutors, or could pay for many other educational experiences in local museums or local homeschool resource centers. But parents are not getting that choice regarding those funds. Still, it is true that homeschooling is currently legal in all 50 US states, although it is not legal in a lot of Europe. So, at least that is a start. Europe's school are less bad though, because in general the money follows the kid, and parents have much more choice of schooling including Waldorf, free schools, and so on, where any alternative school that can attract kids is assured of a decent revenue and decently paid teachers. By contrast, the Albany Free School can't pay its teachers much and also survives in part by some wise early investments in local real estate.
Sure, there will be failures by some families if families decide how to spend all that money -- and in those cases, the community may have to step in. But as the point above about tents suggests, most families, given enough resources, will do a better job of education than schools -- especially in today's internet age with ready access to any sort of educational material.
And public schools themselves produce oh so many failures in oh so many ways -- even including kids with straight A's.
See for example, on "A's":
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
"Both rewards and punishments, says Punished by Rewards author Alfie Kohn, are ways of manipulating behavior that destroy the potential for real learning. Instead, he advocates providing an engaging curriculum and a caring atmosphere âoeso kids can act on their natural desire to find out.â"
And on the problems resulting from grades:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/artic...
"Researchers have found three consistent effects of using â" and especially, emphasizing the importance of â" letter or number grades:
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself. ...
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks. ...
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking. ...
The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But as they say on late-night TV commercials, Wait â" thereâ(TM)s more. ..."
And even deeper issues:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/sc...
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."