> A granny flat or mother-in-law suite would be cheating. It's a separate apartment. Your parents are your neighbors not your room-mates anymore.

That's correct. It gives some semblance of independence. My point with that one is that even if US residents were inclined to "cheat", current zoning laws in most municipalities makes building additions, or expanding to duplexes and triplexes illegal. Other things like, requiring onsite parking, setbacks, not allowing mixed-use zones impacts the ability to have affordable housing.

These laws are changing. Portland recently expanded the zoning laws to allow many of those. The activists who got that through campaigned under the banner of "walkability", but it was a lot more than that. Other cities may follow as they see how well Portland does.

> Education in other countries is far more strict and regimented than the US. Especially Asia.

I was born in Taiwan and was raised mostly in the US, so I have had a taste of what that strictness is. A lot of the structure that the US compulsory school system is based on, took their playbook from the way the Indian caste system educate their children. That educational system was there before the industrialization took that method for its own use.

To be clear, when we're talking about "education", we're talking about "compulsory education" that is part of the predominant paradigm of the modern world. Prior to the compulsory educational laws, the US had a literacy rate of 99%, in a nation of farmers. Kids were taught at home or in one-room schools. It was understood that the main purpose of education was not to create factory workers, but to have critically-thinking and informed citizens in a republic. The contrast between that and our current generation of algorithm-driven conspiracy theories is stark.

What I just talked about and more is in John Taylor Gatto's book.

There are alternative models showing up here. Alaska does not put all the kids all in the same grade. There are too many kids in the bush. Instead, kids learn each subject at the competency level independently. A kid might be at 8th grade reading level for example, and still working through 3rd grade math. Carol Sandford's work on education is much more radical -- no cirriculum, no teachers, no grading. Instead, capabilities like critical thinking are developed, and the kids are taught a framework in which they evaluate their contributions and actions. The kids decide what they want to contribute, and then they figure out how they are going to do it.

> I've always thought the main driver for leaving home is instinctive, basically teenage rebelliousness. If there's cultural "programming" going on, it is just as likely to be in the societies that overcome these drives and keep children subservient to their parents.

Adolescence is a distinct phase that is studied by psychologists during the modern era. It didn't really exist pre-industrialization, pre-compulsory schooling. It used to be, around the pre-teen age, kids were apprenticed and treated as inexperienced young adults. Some cultures had rites of passages that definitively marks when childhood ends, adulthood begins, in a way that the whole community acknowledged. I suppose in the modern era, the ability to be financially independent from the parents a sign of adulthood.

Compounding that is better nutrition, and perhaps, the way our food is grown (hormones), and artificial lighting all contributes towards an earlier age of pubescence. Modern kids' physical maturity are happening at a younger age at the same that the length of time before they are treated as a full adult gets extended.

> US had a literacy rate of 99%, in a nation of farmers. Kids were taught at home or in one-room schools. It was understood that the main purpose of education was not to create factory workers, but to have critically-thinking and informed citizens in a republic. The contrast between that and our current generation of algorithm-driven conspiracy theories is stark.

That is complete bullshit. In 1870 there was a 20% illiteracy rate: https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/lit_history.asp

I suggest you seriously reconsider your views on how the current education system works vs how it used to be back when people were on farms and learning in one room schoolhouses. It smells to me like you’ve been fed a line of bullshit by someone who has a beef with the current system and just wants to paint the ignorance-filled past with rose-colored enlightenment glasses. This society of highly literate, critical thinking farmers did not exist.

According to that article you linked, the method in which they were using puts the 1979 literacy rate at 0.6%.

"The more recent focus on illiteracy has centered on functional literacy, which addresses the issue of whether a person's educational level is sufficient to function in a modern society. The earlier surveys of illiteracy examined a very fundamental level of reading and writing. The percent of illiteracy, according to earlier measurement methods, was less than 1 percent of persons 14 years old and over in 1979."

I don't know where that 99% figure that John Gatto Taylor came from. He did talk about a significantly lower literacy rate in the 1970s. I think if one were to use functional literacy as the metric, there would still be a similar decrease literacy rate.

And no, Taylor was not trying to paint the past with rose-colored glasses. Whether or not the farming society did a good enough job as citizens, the frame in which education was viewed was much different. The things from the past is not necessarily better, but neither are the way we are doing things right now.

This.

See my comment above :)

> It was understood that the main purpose of education was not to create factory workers, but to have critically-thinking and informed citizens in a republic

Lol. Read Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith... having children was for the purpose of making you rich!

Also, that’s if you even made it to the age of 14. In 1870, survival rate of reaching to the age of 14 was about 30%

Are you saying that Adam Smith's writings was representitive of the views espoused by all the American framers and philosophers of that era?

How does the survival rate of someone who has reached the age of 14 have an effect on literacy and citizenship?

Here's your original point:

> It was understood that the main purpose of education was not to create factory workers, but to have critically-thinking and informed citizens in a republic

Are you saying the seminal book in economics documenting at the time of the Declaration of Independence that having children in the Western world was to help you get rich (opposite was going on in China) was incorrect?

> How does the survival rate of someone who has reached the age of 14 have an effect on literacy and citizenship?

It doesn't, but when your literal survival is against the odds and you're task every day is to maintain sustenance, I'm not sure your comment about a whopping 99% rate literacy hold water.

> Are you saying the seminal book in economics documenting at the time of the Declaration of Independence that having children in the Western world was to help you get rich (opposite was going on in China) was incorrect?

Leaving aside whether I agreed with that point about children being there to make you rich (I don't), or whether everyone in America agreed with that (I doubt it), and we're just looking at the various colonists (excluding the Natives) making up the 13 colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence, I don't know if that would be considered the seminal book to the point that it influenced how education is viewed. I see (at least according to Wikipedia), it had influenced Alexander Hamilton, but I also think Hamilton in many ways was ahead of his time. It is my understanding though, that those ideas become much more commonplace in the mid- and late 19th century.

> ... when your literal survival is against the odds and you're task every day is to maintain sustenance, I'm not sure your comment about a whopping 99% rate literacy hold water.

So I am to understand that you are saying, because conditions are so harsh, there is very little time to do things like studying or reading?

A curious thing happened in the Midwest in the early 1800s. Land was divided in a way where schools and colleges were deliberately set aside so that children would have access to it. For every N plots of land, there would be a school; for every M plots of land, there would be a college. I don't think any other region of the US was divided like this. The educated farmer, at least in the Midwest, is a thing.

That bit came from an article by someone observing that the Midwest seems prototypically boring, without characteristic. They were trying to explore just what makes the Midwest the "Midwest". The essay was not written as a criticism of the education system.