Public education isn't for the children -- it's for the market.

A modest amount of public education protects against small scale market inefficiencies -- quacks selling poison, the illiterate being defrauded by their employers -- thus liberating a lot of spending power which is gobbled up by large scale, centralized market inefficiencies -- the myth of cancer treatment, the American college system, the legally sophisticated defrauding their employees.

There is no incentive for the really wealthy -- the people with the people's taxes, their work hours, their confidence -- to put money into education that would only make them harder to control.

Knowledge arises as a sort of after thought, and scholarship is a hobby; only in cases where the information asymmetry can be turned to advantage -- in religion, in technology, even in education itself -- does the scholar become a professional. Maybe the wise would be better off hiding their talent instead of making it available for institutional use?