Education is following as similar course. Things like MITs open courseware, edX, etc. are making it increasingly easy to get the educational content from top teachers regardless of how limited these teachers are.
(Having access to an education is not the same as actually getting a degree, and getting a degree isn't always the same as getting an education.)
But there has probably never been a time in history where more people had free or inexpensive access to the top educational content in the world.
I see where you are coming from on access to labs, chemicals, and equipment. But someone who has fully availed themselves of everything they can learn from free/inexpensive online classes, books, forums, emailing people, etc. is headed on a path where they have a high probability of getting access to those types of things once that is the only thing blocking their continued education.
Not suggesting that, and it's wrong anyways: the point here is that we, as a society, want people to have a basic floor of an education by the time they reach adulthood. Not necessarily MIT, but not nothing either, and the track I was on for a bit in my childhood was closer to "nothing" than it was to "decent", and it was certainly way off course if I were to shoot for MIT.
For the students that never left that track… I cannot imagine that school did much, if anything, to produce a citizen with a high-school education.
Without pointing to a vague notion of "we're different people", I think there's a few key things that were different, despite everything that was the same:
* She's the second child, I'm the first: there were some things in my education that my mother literally said "we are fixing that for her". (And I should note that I don't resent this: my mother was clearly doing the best she could with the information she had — and because she loved us. But she had more information during Round 2.)
* Education is a finite resource: in my home state, whether I got into a decent school (i.e., a magnet school) was dependent on the literal roll of a dice. (Literally literally. I.e., list of names goes in, gets shuffled, top n go to good school & gets educated, bottom m talent gets wasted.) In the worst case I was 5th? 6th? from the bottom of a several hundred person long wait list. She got in. She got a year in the magnet system that I didn't (I got entry a little over a year later). That missing year was an enormous detriment to my education and growth; it was such a clear detriment my parents were contemplating whether they could afford a Catholic private school (we're not Catholic) or simple home-schooling. Had they had the gift of clairvoyance, I think they would have the moment I was denied.
* Almost certainly the gift of a computer got me interested in CS. She didn't get one, and her interests are different. (She's still STEM, likely due to our parents.)