But suppose that your regular bar served absinthe, and offered 12-hour/day child care?!
I'm coming around to the thesis that compulsory education is fundamentally systematic child-care to enable parents to participate in post-industrial employment and labor without needing to be around too much, attempting to raise their bothersome kids at home.
We had "latchkey kids" in the 1980s or so, and nowadays we've got parents ignoring their children at home while working from the kitchen table, or in the den.
With the rise of feminism, "equal pay for equal work", and girlbosses, there's basically nobody left who knows how to raise children, or wants to do it for free (not merely free, but the opportunity cost of skilled employment), so it makes sense for the State to expand public education as much as humanly possible so that children are mostly out-of-the-way and never home, except to sleep.
Parents are spending like 2X of their time on their children now than they did decades ago, so your overall thesis is exactly backwards. Parenting is perceived as a much more intensive activity now, which is so many people are having fewer (or no) kids. The reason seems to be safety culture: Despite society actually being much safer than it was back then, parents don't perceive this to be true, thus children aren't allowed out to play on their own like they used to be. It used to be common that children would be out all day every day planning amongst their own, and only came back for dinner and then bedtime curfew. And that included getting themselves to and from school when school was in session.
I'm coming around to the thesis that compulsory education is fundamentally systematic child-care to enable parents to participate in post-industrial employment and labor without needing to be around too much, attempting to raise their bothersome kids at home.
We had "latchkey kids" in the 1980s or so, and nowadays we've got parents ignoring their children at home while working from the kitchen table, or in the den.
With the rise of feminism, "equal pay for equal work", and girlbosses, there's basically nobody left who knows how to raise children, or wants to do it for free (not merely free, but the opportunity cost of skilled employment), so it makes sense for the State to expand public education as much as humanly possible so that children are mostly out-of-the-way and never home, except to sleep.