It's enough to make you believe in conspiracy theory.
There's an old saw that as head of the Klu Klux Klan you couldn't come up with a scheme more pernicious to American Blacks1 than the welfare state. Similarly, as a petty government bureaucrat, you couldn't come up with a better scheme to produce passive, submissive subjects than the American Public School System.
Both, are perfect examples of how stated intentions have nothing to do with the inevitable results.
The reasons given for a government role in education, never indoctrination, is that of the public good. That a government of the people, by the people, for the people can only be better and improved if the people are better and improved. By ignoring the education of your "less well-off" neighbor's children you risk giving rise to a lumpen proletariat which might put your offspring, if not yourself, at risk.
This argument has been the cloak since the first "compulsory attendence" laws for public schools were introduced in the early colonies by well meaning elitists who felt that they and they alone have the right plan to make everything better for everyone. If you read the writings of these elitists you find the model on which they modelled the school system and which has remained unchanged to this day, the Prussian School systems. And it you read the plans and reasons for that the goal is again transparently clear, a production line system to produce cannon fodder for the government, in this case a prussian king with insatiable plans for empire and greatness who was also called George.
This is nothing new, the plan of the elitists are all different, in some cases contradictory, but they all recognized the utility of the model as the perfect means to their end. It was Aristotle who said, "Give me the boy till he's five and I'll give you the man." The other common factor is that elitists while professing the utmost care and compassion for those they seek to help have in fact, at root, nothing but contempt for them. They see their fellow man as a fallen or not yet fulfilled creature who, without their help, will be condemned to flounder about lost and lonely. In fact, along the lines of "remove the mote from your own eye first," I have always felt that at the root of these people is an innate sense of inadequacy, a fear of dealing with a wild and unpredicable world which they have to constantly react to in order to survive. Instead they seek the calm flat sea where they can float effortlessly and untroubled if only the rest of the unruly mob would just stop rocking the boat! So they fret around, checking the strawberry icecream.
Of course, I'm not being elitist by taking such a pitying view of my opponents and if you fall for that argument they've succeeded again is slipping under the cloak of "conspiracy theorist..." Unlike them, I have no intention of changing them or forcing them to partake of reeducation or therapy or anything else. But in return they damn well better leave me and mine alone!
Its enough to make you believe in Conspiracy Theory.
1I know they are not Black but they are no more African than I'm a Viking an Anglo or a Saxon!