sigh… how can one be so dumb?

Realistically, schools were designed to provide a trainable workforce that could read well enough to learn new tasks and do enough math to make sure the factory machines were properly maintained.

Many people these days don’t read a single book after they get out of school. The AIs are just making things happen faster.

From a broader perspective “school” has been a thing since before Socrates and humanity pendulums between “a broad education is the foundation for a strong populace” and “we need a giant pool of disposable labor”.

And the US public education philosophy is similarly inconsistent. At the earliest it was Puritans who wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible for themselves and so pushed for literacy. At times it has been guided specifically by the business economy but it’s inaccurate to say that schools were designed to produce factory workers.

Yeah, hell modern universal public education was partly a result of the working class fighting like hell for it

Modern universal public eduction has its roots in prussian model and the idea was very much to make effective and loyal workforce. Im not saying modern education has the same ulterior motivations, but things like standarized curricula and grading are coming from there.