I could rant here but I’ll quote John Taylor Gatto, former NYC school principal.

“The real makers of modern schooling weren’t at all who we think. Not Cotton Mather or Horace Mann or John Dewey. The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrialist class, men like: AndrewCarnegie, the steel baron… John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil… Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty… and JP Morgan, the king of capitalist finance.”

“You aren’t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year. From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States. Your great-great-grandmother didn’t have to surrender her children. What happened?
If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?”

You can read his book The Underground History of American Education, in its entirety at 

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row]