No time for sex at home, please
This article from the Economist is much more nuanced than you might think — especially about all the benefits of attending school that are unrelated to what specifically goes on in the classroom. But if you couple it with a close reading of Bryan Caplan’s ‘The Case Against Education’ then it is hard not to feel that the academy has been guilty of failing to check out their own entrails before passing judgement on everybody else’s.
It sounds like a counsel of despair. If every child went to school, millions more would sit in woeful, boring classrooms. But while this sounds awful, it would probably still be good for them, their families and broader society. For, as Justin Sandefur of CGD points out, there is plenty of evidence that even when children do not learn much at school, they still do better for having gone.
Some benefits are economic. Attending school for longer is associated with earning more in later life, in part because those with additional schooling are more likely to get non-agricultural jobs and move to cities. This may indicate that young people are in fact learning something useful at school that is not being picked up by researchers. But it could also be a signalling effect: a shopkeeper may prefer workers who stayed at school for at least five years.
One is simply that if girls are at school they are not having sex at home