It's designed to churn out compliant cogs, and through various forces has only become better at doing so. Modern western public education is based on the Prussian school system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system) which emphasizes compliance, uniformity, attendance, punctuality, busy work, etc. All of which are great for making functional factory workers, but that has become less and less relevant as the nature of the economy has changed due to technological disruption. More so, the increasing disempowerment of individuals and refusal to treat students as adults in training (see: closed campuses, zero tolerance policies, etc.) has merely exacerbated that impedance mismatch. Now we have high school graduates who can barely read or do algebra let alone use rules of logic to reason or communicate effectively on complex topics at a time when knowledge workers are in the greatest demand in all of human history.