Comment by Nursie

The author paints a picture of schools as literal prison, as a place where children are forced to go to waste their time and be tortured. They invite the reader to conclude that the entire exercise is worthless and should be abandoned -

"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."

"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "

> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?

It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.

If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.