Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can’t help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
Kinda reminds me of slavery but in reverse
Instead of enslaved people becoming increasingly educated and more demanding of freedom, free people become increasingly illiterate and closer to a slave-like status