Learn what? What you think is true? What I think is true? What Osama thinks is true? What Farmer Bob thinks is true?
The state will determine what kids learn, what they need to learn, and why they need to learn it. Their motives may be very honorable when they start, but the result will always be the same. It is too great a power.
You and I agree on the role of the parents.
I asked about the percentage of the military to help you guage what percentage of the school's output is that level. I would posit that current and former military is not more than 10% of the population and probably significantly less. But I'll let you look it up since you brought the military into this.
I would also posit that the average parent of someone in the military is a much better parent than the average parent.
Shalom.
When they were first founded the students had an opportunity to learn to read and write, do simple math, introduction to sciences, learn some history, read books, move on to Latin and Greek even Hebrew in some schools.
And with local school boards being elected the subject matters can vary according to the desires of those boards as long as they prepare the students to pass the exit tests.
Today the better schools have a vastly expanded curriculum with advanced science and math, multi-year programs in half dozen or more languages, advanced courses in history, statistics etc.
Apparently you are unfamiliar with the realities of modern schooling preferring to put the ideological blinders on and swallow the anti-public school bilge regularly doled out here.