The following is an answer and/or comment by inhahe aka ColorStorm (inhahe.com - myriachromat.wordpress.com).
- It's a mental labor camp for children. It's worse than prison because it doesn't allow children to socialize (most of the time) and they have to perform arduous mental tasks all day.
- It causes pressure and stress to levels that sometimes make children's lives hell, and for those whose lives it doesn't make hell overall, it's still hell now and then and some light version of hell the rest of the time.
- It compromises the loving relationship between parent and child by putting pressure on the parents to have their children perform well. This results in conditional love and far more punishment-time or threats of punishment than would be necessary otherwise. You can say it's still love, but of the 'tough' variety, but the bottom line is that it causes strife and makes children resent their parents.
- It drills in thousands of thousands of facts, which for the most part are useless and forgotten as soon as possible after exams and will never be needed or put to use, either directly or indirectly, in real life. And it doesn't teach a lot that's actually useful in life, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0 ('Don't Stay in School')
- It teaches children to conform mentally to authority, rather than to think independently or creatively. I couldn't find the article, but I read once that there was a survey and some majority percentage of children said that schooling has actually decreased their levels of creativity. Of course, they could have just said this because they hate school, but even if that's the case, you don't really need a survey to know that having to remember and regurgitate answers all day that teachers deem to be "correct" does the opposite of fostering creativity.

School should be optional instead of mandatory, or at least it should be limited to teaching basic things like literacy and arithmetic. Reading should perhaps be taught at a later age so that it doesn't impact children's cognitive dispositions very substantially, at least if something some wise person I know said is correct. If anything else is taught in grade school maybe it should be vocational stuff, at the choosing of the student according to what they want to do in life, and other things like how to file a mortgage and what it is, or what laws there are, etc., as mentioned in the YouTube video linked to above. Or *these* subjects, as suggested in one of Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God books:

- Understanding Power
- Peaceful Conflict Resolution
- Elements of Loving Relationships
- Personhood and Self Creation
- Body, Mind and Spirit: How They Function
- Engaging Creativity
- Celebrating Self, Valuing Others
- Joyous Sexual Expression
- Fairness
- Tolerance
- Diversities and Similarities
- Ethical Economics
- Creative Consciousness and Mind Power
- Awareness and Wakefulness
- Honesty and Responsibility
- Visibility and Transparency
- Science and Spirituality

Oh, and some more things:

- Teachers are underpaid. This isn't just a bad thing for the teachers, it's a bad thing for the children as it means lower-quality teachers overall. The more you pay, the more job seekers you attract and the more selective you can be in your hiring.
- Teachers should have a bigger say in how schooling is done. There are some decisions by the school board that teachers absolutely despise because it generally makes everything worse overall. The school board should listen to these concerns which reflect how their policies are actually impacting things in real-world practice. For example, I forget what the word for it is but there's a new way of testing children (well, not *that* new), I think to make sure they all meet some kind of national standards or something, under which teachers don't really have the time to teach kids most of what they really should be learning because they have to spend months and months preparing them for these particular tests.
- Teachers are bogged down too much in paperwork. Most of the time they spend working is spent filling out bureaucratic paperwork. Not only is this a massive waste of time and energy, but it makes teaching less fun and perhaps makes many teachers who have lively personalities and really love children turn away from the job. It makes it mostly a 'desk job.'

Maybe some of my information on the points regarding teachers is a little off, my knowledge is sketchy because I just know most of these things from bits and pieces of conversations I've heard, but I probably have more of an inside look than most because I have at least three relatives who are or had been teachers as a career. Those are the people whose conversations I I've overheard.