It was wrecked the minute we made education mandatory and government sponsored. At that moment it ceased to be education and turned into propaganda/indoctrination. It was only a matter of time until the bad teaching drove out the good. See Gresham’s law.
The solution: remove all laws governing education and watch the free market fill in the gaps. Central planning always fails.
I agree with everything you said up to the last sentence. The central planning purposes of government schooling appear to be greasing the skids to hell more effectively than the planners’ wildest dreams could have imagined.