Should society eliminate schools?
The question is too vague as it's stated, but I think society should eliminate schools in their present form. This is a rather worthless statement though, at least unless it's fleshed out by a reasonably detailed description of what that alternative world would look like.
I think it would be a substantial win to at least cut down the years of schooling on the margin and replace them with work and/or apprenticeships whenever possible. An uncontroversial example: the fact that physicians and lawyers in the US have to complete a whole separate undergraduate degree before going to medical school or law school seems like a colossal waste of time and resources, and many civilized places in the world get by just fine without this extension.
So on the margin, I think it's good to move in the direction of "eliminating schools". Whether you want to go all the way and what happens if you do is more complicated, though I think there are definitely more promising alternative systems that would qualify. These are more speculative and only of theoretical interest given where we currently are as a society, though.
Should we have more compulsory schooling?
On the margin, I don't see how more compulsory schooling would help with anything useful, and the costs are significant, even aside from the moral concerns with forcing children to go to school et cetera. So the answer here looks fairly overdetermined to be "no" unless marginal years of schooling are shown to have substantial benefits.
Should you send your kids to school?
Depends on the situation. Do the kids want to go to school? Do you think careers that would be the best fit for them require one to go through some formal accreditation process that involves schooling? How feasible it is for you to arrange an alternative to going to school for purposes that are relevant, and what are the costs of not participating in the existing system?
I would put significant weight on the preference of the kids in question here, and I can easily imagine that some of them want to go to school and others don't. A "one size fits all" policy seems inappropriate here.
Should you prefer to hire job candidates who have received more schooling, beyond school's correlation with the g factor?
There are other reasons to prefer such candidates, but it depends on exactly which job you're hiring for. People who are "competent" despite not going to school right now are all highly unusual people in various ways, and they might generally be unusual in a way that makes them poor fits for the specific job you have in mind. So in that case going to school would be a valuable signal above and beyond the correlation with g.
Should we consider the spread of education requirements to be a form of class war by the better-educated against the worse-educated which must be opposed for the sake of the worse-educated and the future of society?
Probably not. I don't see what reason there is to invent such an explanation for the phenomenon of schooling, or what predictive power or utility it would have.
I find it more productive to view schooling and its shortcomings (as many other things) as coordination failures and problems imposed by scarcity than any kind of "class war" by some group against another. Useful thinking about these questions should contend with the coordination issues surrounding signaling etc. and the substantial opportunity cost of having high-quality teachers in too many classrooms.
BJ Novak in "One More Thing, Stories and other Stories" has Stories (surprise surprise) about this - from a principle who decides (on principle) - fuck it - no more math, to a summer camp run by an eccentric genius for gifted kids to do drugs, have sex, and have fun while avoiding paralyzing levels of self-awareness. It's very refreshing fantasy.
l could easily write about this topic for literal days.
At 16 I tried writing my own choose-your-own-adventure math hypertextbook (US middle to high school algebra and geometry - "common core"), only to be stymied by a vast swath of misty unknowns. Who needs to know what? How deep? To the foundations or just to do some particular task? Why? How do you know if someone has learned the deep ideas? Is it just a novelty effect you're seeing? Is that a problem? How do you structure infrastructure to optimize for the ideals of a fractious mass in a decade-long person manufactory/child jail to fuel the economy with educated workers And democracy with educated citizens And keep millions upon millions of vulnerable serfs with no legal liberties interested and happy and healthy and not shooting each other while ruled over by underfunded low-IQ taskmasters who can't educate without incurring excessive bureaucracy to get extremely overworked students to be competitive in getting to collages that usually don't work.
I was an afterschool math tutor at Mathnasium. I was in the strange position of working at a service business for whom the vast majority of our direct clients did not actually want our services. The only other example I can call to mind is private prisons. That fits very well with my own extremely depressing and disempowering, suffering experience of my ten + years of mandatory education. I was not legally allowed to leave the building without exceptional circumstances and the permission of a superior.
Improving education is an absolutely bizarrely ridiculously hard problem.
The feedback cycles to know if someone has retained their schooling are typically very, very slow. Gamification and digital tracking of activities is useful for this - but remove students from the on-the-ground gears-level problems that their education is supposed to help them solve. This is where I first discovered the idea of an alignment and control problem, in the context of the classic "as soon as a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure". Grades, though empirical, are shit tools for determining how and if things are working - and why they aren't. In math, kids almost always don't know how even to try to solve real-world, unfamiliar problems they haven't already been taught step-by-step how to solve. During exploratory periods of development, children in many places have almost no autonomy over what happens to them or what they do during an average day. This is catastrophic for the development of learning people.