It has been twenty-three years since A Nation at Risk, a report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education, reported that schools in the U.S. were caught in "a rising tide of mediocrity."  Since then, efforts to stem the tide have done little but make the situation worse.  More drastic measures are needed, and here we propose one that nobody else has suggested – shut down the schools.

Constructing, maintaining, and staffing public schools costs huge sums of money.  Many kids dislike, and some even hate, going to school.  Many parents view school as little more than a place to deposit their kids and keep them off the streets while the parents do whatever it is they have to do during the day.  We face a teacher shortage anyway.  Many teachers are leaving the profession because they find it increasingly frustrating to deal with kids who don't want to be in school or because they spend as much or more time dealing with bureaucratic red tape as they do trying to teach.  The value of a high school diploma has fallen precipitously to the level of near worthlessness.  As a representation of learning or preparedness for the workaday world, it has about the same value as a check drawn on a bank account that contains insufficient funds.

Let's take a hard look at what we would gain by closing the schools, while meeting the objections of those who consider this proposal to be unthinkable.

The amount of money saved would be enormous.  Citizens would be allowed to pocket the real estate and other taxes that they currently pay to support schools.  They could then use this money to pay for private day care for younger children and tutoring for the older ones.  The abandoned school buildings could be converted to sources of income for communities instead of being economic sinkholes in which the primary beneficiaries are administrators and bureaucrats.  (If this means that the administrators and bureaucrats would be out of work, so be it.  They could surely find other gravy trains to ride in the state or federal government.)  Buildings could be converted to low-rent apartment houses, auditoriums to public theaters, athletic fields to public playgrounds, gyms to fitness centers.  Perhaps small fees for the use of the facilities could go toward financing private day care and tutorial services for people who do not have sufficient assets to benefit from the tax cuts that accrue as a result of closing the schools.

Other benefits would soon become apparent.  Freed from the constraints imposed upon them by a school calendar, families could go on vacation whenever they wanted.  Although many would still select the summer months, especially in the northern states, chances are that popular vacation spots would become less crowded, and the tourist industry would benefit from year-round business.  The makers of school supplies might suffer somewhat, but we don't think it would affect them very much.  After all, today's essential school supplies – iPods, cell phones, designer jeans, and so on – have little to do with schools and education anyway.

What would happen to the teachers?  Eventually, of course, no schools would mean no certified teachers.  However, until then, many could hire themselves out as private tutors.  Those with useful skills could find other work that probably pays better and would no longer be forced to spend their days feeling as if they were vaudeville acts in a sleazy club populated by youthful hecklers.  Those who lacked both the knowledge for tutoring and any marketable skills could go to college (the colleges would remain open) to learn something that would make them contributing members of society – or they could hire out as babysitters, a job in which they already have considerable experience.

How would children learn anything if the schools closed?  Forget for a moment that there's considerable debate about whether they are learning much or anything now.   Apparently, most of what they do learn (for better or worse) is learned from their peers, television, the Internet, and other sources of information (and misinformation) that won't go away when the schools close.  Many young adults will tell you that most of what they have learned that is of any real value has not been "book learning" or "school stuff."  They may perhaps admit that, when they were very young children, they entertained the illusion that those kinds of knowledge were useful and even interesting.  However, now that they are wiser and more sophisticated, they have come not only to doubt the value of what they learned as children but also to discard and forget such useless stuff.  They are quick to point out that Bill Gates would have become a billionaire whether or not he had ever read a Shakespearean play, solved an algebra problem, or dissected a frog.

Learning will still happen without schools.  Even if it doesn't, we probably won't notice much difference.  Employers who hire people with "only" a high school diploma don't care whether they can read and write, and the business will train them to do whatever the job requires.  Young people have no need for education in the principles of democracy, for they have ample access around election time to TV commercials that will tell them how to vote.  Mathematics is redundant; we have calculators and cash registers to handle the arithmetic and computers to do the harder stuff.  Science?  One good fall off a roof should teach anyone about gravity, and anything that can't be learned by experience is just theory anyway.

Let's stop wringing our hands over these institutions and shut them down.  Let's make the kids happy.  Show me a kid who isn't happy when school closes for a snow day or some other reason, and I'll show you a maladjusted overachiever.  Do we want to keep schools open just to suit these misfits?