The bureaucrats who set curriculum are accountable to no one but themselves. If they were actually accountable to politicians and ultimately to the common people, that would be a vast improvement over the status quo - after all, most people are well aware of the sorry state of our K12 education.

I don't think you understand how the bureaucracy is staffed. The bureaucrats who's jobs are protected are accountable directly or indirectly to people who are not. Basically if you are doing your job "too well" it will be bad on the metrics of someone directly or indirectly above you and your boss will prevent you from doing your job that well which is not something you want if you want a successful career as a bureaucrat. This is kids who live in a single party state get a crap education in history or science (which depends on the color of the state).

> "after all, most people are well aware of the sorry state of our K12 education."

K-12 education is not so blanketly "sorry". basic literacy has been at 99% for decades. could it be better? potentially. obviously so? not really, at least not to a sufficient level of consensus.

with that said, i'd love to see rationalism (not just logic, but also inductive reasoning) taught and honed throughout primary/secondary school to improve our collective abilities to discern and deconstruct narratives of all kinds.

Government will just follow what the public wants, gov is not one person, it doesn't have a free will to plot against humanity like that. It's not of any individual (corrupted) politician's interest to make people stupid. They're interested in power and money for ther short term of their service.

Actually, organizations like corporations or especially states have their own psychology.

Even the biggest corps in the world usually have their strategic decisions centralised with a few clear goals (all hav something to do with the bottom line). Gov on the other hand are ejuggled between different political interests, election timeline and public interest which it's supposed to care for is neither clearly defined nor as narrow as a corp.