Personally, I think that things are going exactly as planned. Back in the day (1900 - 1910ish), Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller were great philanthropists, and giving lots of money to establish schools, and pushing for major educational reform. Why is this? If they wanted to process steel in a new place, or run more trains, or ... they had to get people off the street, take the time, money, and effort to teach them the skills that they needed, etc. And they didn't even have a common starting point, so they didn't know what skills they would need to teach. If, however, everyone in all corners of the nation had the same exact skillset at a given age, then they could open a new factory anywhere in the US where the average wage was lowest, or shipping costs were lowest, or ... and could do so knowing exactly how long it would take to finish training the people. Furthermore, they would have to pay to teach less skills because the people paid taxes for public schools, and therefore paid for their own education. ie: free training as far as Morgan/Carnegie/... were concerned.
My opinion is this: Things are the way that they are because that's how the people with money want them to be. A nice happy consumer nation that has to "keep up with the Joneses", and will do as they are told on the job. They show up on time, eat on time, leave on time, etc. All in the name of ruthless efficiency, and profit. When they found that the shipping costs were much less than the labor costs, they started outsourcing jobs where the education+shipping+labor was cheaper than the labor in the US. When they found that the education in India was fairly good, they started outsourcing more high-tech things there, etc. All is going according to the master plan.
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