How would a public school even work without a state?
Correct question. I was arguing in light of the non-libertarian status quo. For instance, homeschooling is forbidden by law in Germany, so parents there don't have much of a choice in the matter without risking life and limb, but from what I know it's possible in the USA.
That said, to the non-libertarians and especially the anti-libertarians, I'd like to share some of my thoughts, perhaps a meaningful discussion is still possible
What I'm seeing in many "questions", especially when things like children are involved, is people who have never in their life built or used a coherent framework going out of their way to look for
gotchas. Like, not asking questions to understand, but fishing for contradictions, in an attempt to justify not thinking
With children especially, it's almost like a a ritual, to me it's plain to see that it's a rhetorical or optics trick, it can be called moral outsourcing. Instead of reasoning from first principles, what happens is that they grab a case where dependency is natural and easy to see, such as an infant, a sick person, or some collective emergency, and then pretend that this justifies permanent authority over everyone. In simpler terms, "if a child needs a guardian, doesn't everyone?" To me this is very obviously the adult's plea to stay a child forever, and the consequences of this nonsense thinking can be seen in daddy government and the paternalistic state that must
obviously intervene for "our" benefit and "our own good".
And what I've seen earlier in this discussion is also pretty obvious nonsense. Every instance of voluntary coordination becomes "politics", every act of preservation becomes "rule", every refusal to obey becomes "an attempt to seize power". Like, these people are seemingly genuinely incapable of imagining coexistence without command, so in their mangled worldview, freedom is treated like an obviously self-contradictory malfunction, like a glitch.
Ultimately, the core of every anti-libertarian is the conviction that, because
they can't live without a master, no one else can either. Like, I'm not sure if I ever said it clearly or openly before, but it is not my job, my duty, or my intention to force slaves into freedom. If you wanna lick boots and be happy, just do it. I'm even going to leave you alone and in peace as long as your master, government, keeps his hands off me.