[xster]

I think there's also a risk of conflating 'education' with our 'education system' that teaches citizens to be good productive workers but doesn't teach citizens how to analyze and debate about the nature of our society.

I believe the parent might be referring to 'education' as in logic, political history, philosophy so that the student can retrace the historical steps and recreate a societal scaffold that may or may not look like society today in the same way civil engineers are taught trig, calculus, static mechanics etc so the engineer can retrace historical steps and engineer the structures that may or may not reinforce or criticize our engineering approaches today.