[Daniel_Newby]

> When public school was demanded, the educated upper class thought it abhorrent and dangerous to give poor children this kind of free-form, liberating education.

Rather a lot of the scientists and engineers on the Apollo program grew up in tiny backwater schools funded by local subscription. Their teachers were high school graduates or (if lucky) graduates of a two year normal college. The "educated upper class" consisted of the local town fathers who thought that the average teenager was capable of a lot more than the amusements they would have otherwise picked for themselves. It turns out the town fathers were right.

> Everything in public schools is optimized to create obedience, unthinking, conformity, rigidity.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote of learning the classics of high culture in what you are claiming are industrial indoctrination factories.

> Tell me one thing you learned from a lesson plan that did you any good.

Calculus, computer science, electromagnetism, chemistry, writing, poetry, etc. 16-year-old me was not yet organized and knowledgeable enough to know where to even begin.