What Is The Nature of Our Mandatory Public Schooling?

I'm going to try, over the next little while, to have this be an evolving post, trying to illustrate the development, in the early 19th century of mandatory state schooling in Prussia, its adoption in America (and Canada in a large part), its true purposes, and its evolution and consequences in terms of the self-sufficiency (or lack thereof) of the general population and the lack of ability to think critically and effictively about the things that are fundamental about the organization of our society.

Depending on how I do with this and how long it takes, I may also try and show how universities, at different points true vestiges of human discovery, are ever-increasingly used as tools to further political-economic agendas.