My thoughts: Families need to raise children. We need to teach parents how to create families and not just children. It all begins in the home. IMO as we continually decide that parents can't do this "correctly" and take more and more of it away from them (requiring the children to be removed from the home for schooling at tender ages) then they will learn less and less and less. This appears, to me, to be what has happened.

This is a slippery slope, the government deciding it can do a better job than the one's who rightfully own it. I'm not a socialist. The government cannot do a better job, ever, if the parents will do it. It is a moral issue, not a political one, this issue of who should raise the children.
NOTE: This paragraph may contain triggering references.
I will go out a bit farther on this limb and say that this is why God gave us families. Man, woman, children. The head of the house to be the one responsible to make sure his household follows the set of parameters that God set forth. Spirituality is a big thing in a human's life. It also allows for supernatural guidance, and, regardless of the system one adheres to, gives direction on how to grow a family with love. Once the family is broken down, the main foundational platform for good citizens, moral, responsible people, and proliferation of the society is lost. Communists knew what they were doing, grab the child at a young age and they will learn and even if they stray, they will return to them. That's the way it works: and conversely also, keep the child home for those tender years, and the child will always have that as the foundation for life, and will hold it in high regard, and work to keep it secure as they grow up. If we remove the child from the security of home, and place him into a setting that is sterile and cold without understanding and allowance for individuality, learning with love and safety of home and parent, then we have no leg to stand on when we complain how our children have grown up cold, sterile and uncaring for his fellowman. THAT is how the mass killings and selfishness of robbers and rapists run rampant in any country. It all begins by removing them from a nucleus of home before the basic precepts of love, honor, respect and loyalty of family are ingrained.

I'll search for drclay's book evidence on this subject and post it when I can... anyone else is welcome to do the same.