If you agree with John Taylor Gatto, you could argue that the purpose of universal education was never to provide children with opportunities to learn how to make a living (apprenticeships rules date from the middle ages, and every other human society solves this problem somehow), but to condition them to blind obedience and dullness... for the direct benefit of the government (in the age of Napoleonic Wars, you needed lots and lots of idiot sheep that would literally march towards the enemy lines and shoot each other at point blank range) and indirectly to the nascent class of industrialist who needed a new kind of workers who would perform the same micro task over and over again with no regard for the total process.
If you agree with John Taylor Gatto, you could argue that the purpose of universal education was never to provide children with opportunities to learn how to make a living (apprenticeships rules date from the middle ages, and every other human society solves this problem somehow), but to condition them to blind obedience and dullness... for the direct benefit of the government (in the age of Napoleonic Wars, you needed lots and lots of idiot sheep that would literally march towards the enemy lines and shoot each other at point blank range) and indirectly to the nascent class of industrialist who needed a new kind of workers who would perform the same micro task over and over again with no regard for the total process.