Wholeheartedly agree! The older I get, the more I think government and big corporate interests want to eliminate as much personal agency and critical thinking as they can, to consolidate their hold on power and money.
Be part of the solution. Teach a kid to fish/shoot/change the oil in the car.
There is an argument that that has been the government and corporate interests' goal since the late 1800s. That was why the public education system became based off of the Prussian system, which was excellent at producing soldiers and employees, and why the public school system had the bell system with different classrooms for each class, versus the same classroom for each grade like in private schools, because it was to condition children. Industry and government interests wanted people who would make obedient employees and pliable consumers and of course pliable voters. T. Boone Pickens inadvertently mentioned this in a book of his years ago, when he talked about how when going to work for a big oil company in the 1950s, it was just like school. You'd go into work, mingle around for a bit, then the bell would ring and you would get to your work station, as you'd been conditioned to by the school system.
A classical education that taught people how to engage in critical thinking skills was reserved for the elite in the Prussian system I believe (I might be mistaken). There are some who also argue that if you really look at who drove the effort to stop child labor, it was big industrial interests themselves, because a problem with child labor, from a long-term social engineering standpoint, is that it makes children turn into adults really fast, which is again something you don't want from a social engineering standpoint. A big corporation with loads of factory workers wants them to be obedient and pliable, not well-educated and very much mature adults, as those can create a whole lot of trouble. However, then WWII happened, and then the Space Race started in the late '50s, which threw a monkey wrench into the whole thing, because now we needed students who were educated in math and science and engineering and could think critically.
Today, the public school system retains these old social engineering remnants leftover from early times, as things like socialism and the idea that the future consisted of just giant corporations with armies of industrial worker drones has gone by the wayside. I've also read that if you research into it, you'll find that you can actually bake a cake from scratch just as fast as a box cake allows, and that corporations were responsible for the impression that baking a cake fast needed a box cake. Companies used to ship instructions on how to disassemble appliances to repair them too.
Today, there's the whole "Right to Repair" movement because companies actively seek to make it where you can't take apart and repair your own stuff, from John Deere tractors to smartphones. And while people may think I am being conspiratorial, I very much believe there is an element of society among big government and big corporate types who want people dumbed down, with no mechanical or repair skills, no guns, and no physical currency either. And mandatory self-driving cars when the technology is available. And no individual homes either, and no meat (unless bugs).
Luckily, there are the Maker and Prepper and Right to Repair movements that help counter this.
