Is the public school system accomplishing its goals? I can say yes to that. Government education is abusive and totalitarian at its core. The system was designed to crush the souls of children and it has done so with brutal and efficient effectiveness. The people who began public schooling commonly talked and wrote about each child as a lump of dough to be collected and shaped into a good fit for their society in such a way that they simply cannot will otherwise. Human souls are not to be kneaded into a particular shape. Minds are not cups waiting to be filled, they are fires to be kindled.
As long as schools continue to segregate children by age, and not ability or by their interests; as long as they heard children around from room to room, person to person, and time to time, teaching them how to be follow directions and not break or question rules or assignments, schools will be accomplishing their goals. Institutions by their nature cannot achieve any other goals. They always encourage obedience and discipline, rather than subversion and creativity. They are centralized structures that depend on the functioning of groups. They measure their success in how well groups did (race, gender, age, socioeconomic status), instead of how well individuals did. And sooner or later, when the mass of people come to be obedient instead of creative, when people define themselves as part of a group and a mere product of their environment instead of a unique and free individual, society will crumble under its own deadweight.
People have been taught to worship educational institutions all their lives. Extolling the greatness of education will get headnods all around, and it is good to help people learn, but we should never turn away from the fact that public schools were designed as children factories, and in nearly all of the Western world, government schools are forced upon people. Schooling is required by law, and this means that if your children do not show up, agents of the state will lock you in a cage and steal your children. This is thuggery. Stealing children is evil. Threatening it is not much better. We need to remember what law means, and remember not to excuse aggressions just because we “respect” the aggressor. Nor should we use soft words to minimize the meaning.
"Ninety-nine students out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident, but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." -- William Harris, US Commissioner of Education, 1906
"Educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. 'Family choice', is therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the 'wants' of a single family rather than the 'needs' of society." -- Association of California School Administrators
"If you want to influence the student at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will." -- Public education founder, Johann Fichte, 1807
"The role of the public official, and in particular of the public school teacher, is to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneadingboard." -- Edward Ross, American sociologist, 1914.
"Schools should serve as factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products, manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."
-- Elwood Cubberly, Dean of Education, Stanford University
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." -- American President Woodrow Wilson