The 4 day school week

Robin Hansen has been writing a lot about the purpose of school.  The main thrust of his theory is that "school functions in part to help folks accept workplace domination"

I was thinking about this framework when I read an article on the four day school week (HT: Anthony). The author found that many rural schools have had to shorten their school weeks to save money.  The twist is that after moving to a 4 day school week, academic scores do not actually suffer.  In certain cases, test scores, attendance and the graduation rate all improved.  If schooling is more about teaching students to accept status differentials as opposed to the school's stated purpose of imparting knowledge, attending school probably requires a substantial amount of willpower from the students. This is likely stressful for students, so lowering the days spent in school could leave enough residual willpower for many of the marginal students to focus on the actual school work rather than merely avoiding discipline.

This is not a win-win scenario for everyone. Many teachers would not like a shorter work week if they had to take a lower salary, parents would have to find babysitters and the children of ambitious parents would probably have extra structured activities similar to school on that free day. Still, it would be interesting to see what would happen if a shorter school week became more common.
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It would be even better if we could see a lot of experiments in alternative schooling, or even experiments in no schooling at all.

I like these alternative theories of education, because they explain certain stylized facts well. The usual explanations, along the lines of, "Study Latin to improve your English vocabulary!", seem completely ludicrous to me. Unfortunately I don't know of a good unification of these theories of education, or even a good taxonomy. Usually I think of them in some sort of jargon--the "signaling model", the "babysitting model", the "networking model", and now the "domination model".
One could say that schools serve all these functions, and somehow sort out which functions are needed on a per-student basis, but this seems incomplete.

The biggest problem I have with the theories is how to give a compelling exposition without offending people. Recently I was explaining one of these ideas to a mathematician friend, who asked some very reasonable questions. But we were unable to keep talking about it, because the people next to us were so offended that they angrily interrupted our conversation. "If people are not educated, how will they learn to appreciate operas?!"

— Dikran
I would be less worried about offending people since people who get easily offended by these types of thought experiments are not the type of people who have useful insights in the first place. Of course, you are a much politer person than I am.
— Jeff Lonsdale
School serves a lot of purposes, but saying each model works in some cases seems to be taking the easy way out. Robin claims that since many models can be used, the best approach is to explain as many models as possible with as few simple assumptions as possible. (I left this link out from the above links, but here it is: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/06/seeking-school-clues.html )

Another problem with the attitude you described in your comment is that it prevents experiments in alternatives because a large subset of people see deviations from the status quo as something akin to sinful.

— Jeff Lonsdale
Yeah, I agree that the people who are easily offended by, for example, discussions of the signaling component of education, are unlikely to have any real insight about the value of potential alternatives to our current school system. One of the reasons I think about their attitudes, though, is that I suspect the evolution of the educational system as we know it today was shaped by these attitudes. Also, any changes we would like to make (and here I assume we would want to change things in the same direction) will have to contend with objections from these same people.

I am not sure what the right model for such people is, but I find "Stuff White People Like" pretty convincing.

— Dikran
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