The public school system was intended to create a populace competent enough to hold down a job and pay taxes, but not intelligent imaginative, inquisitive, or independent enough to question the system (the Prussian system, which our public schools were directly developed from). Also, the school system was intended to "Protestantize" the large number of Catholic children who immigrated here or were born of recent immigrants during the 1800s. In fact, in the northeast there was a time were being a Protestant was required in order to be a teacher. Recently, the apparent shift in school priorities from learning to social engineering isn't really a shift at all; it is just the same machinery being used in the same way but for somewhat different ends.