Yet it is completely useless. Doesn't teach critical thinking, epistemology, etc. There's a "science" class, and that's it. The rest is lexical knowledge memorization about past stuff (wars, plays, novels, poems, politics).

It makes sense that this generates political strife as citizens age through school and out into industry. The current world economy is dependent on knowledge work. Knowledge work requires an ability to interweave, discover and generate novel mental models. If our economy is not generating these types of workers, and labor becomes supplanted by machines, the margin-of-opportunity will continue to decrease as machines take over knowledge work.

The economies and states who are in control at the logical end of that technological progression will be the ones that decide what the future of humanity looks like. Do we get UBI? Do we get social nets? Do we get human rights?