Great questions. It’s beyond my pay grade, but I think a compulsory system isn’t unnatural really. Most aspects of my job are compulsory. I wonder if it’s helpful to imagine a place where we aren’t compelling or being compelled (Maybe Walden Pond? But his mom and sister were doing his laundry). Anyway, I think one benefit of not having recourse to that horizon is the frightening amount of responsibility it puts on us as compellers. I keep coming back to Beauvoir’s description of intersubjectivity:

…when two human categories are together, each aspires to impose its sovereignty upon the other. If both are able to resist this imposition, there is created between them a reciprocal relation, sometimes in enmity, sometimes in amity, always in a state of tension.

As I said in my response to Mark Sonnemann, I wonder if both grades and reform movements centered on “autonomy” come from the same impulse: to exonerate oneself and escape this state of tension.