Just throwing this out there, but bear with me: public education is only fatally flawed if you have mis-identified its goals. Think along the terms of of Robert Kiyosaki's complaints about nobody teaching nothing about money, if you want a less conspiracy-theorist reason for concluding that public education actually discourages autonomy, creativity, and self-sufficiency. My conclusion is that public education fits perfectly with a system that keeps serfs ignorant and happy while paying the Lord for the right to work on his land.
Forgive me if that sounds outlandish but....
I've just recently seen the HUD-1 form for my first-ever real estate sale and cannot fathom how free men and women would willingly have agreed to all these transfer taxes, simply in order to be ALLOWED to sell their own private property, and it made me think that, much like the Zemstvo semi-free structures that the tsar set up before being murdered, our American experiment is probably just a serfdom pig tht was dressed up in liberty lipstick to placate the revolutionaries.
I know that sounds kooky but the idea that the victors write the history books isn't, and we all know that the victors of our recent 1/6 and Covid struggles will definitely frame things THEIR way in twenty years, so...
And also, when you consider how ludicrous it sounds that 18th and 19th-century powers voluntarily and bloodless-ly acquiesced their slaves and power, and yet somehow 21st-century bureaucrats and democratic leaders somehow suddenly cling to their power at all costs, well...
Public education was set up for and achieves exactly what it was set out to do, as an intentional, direct aim in the past, and as an unintended, subconscious side effect today.