The role of private industry is to efficiently produce commodities for individuals or other companies - minus externalities, autos, chips or airplanes are great

The role of private industry is to efficiently produce commodities for individuals or other companies - minus externalities, autos, chips or airplanes are great in private hands. The role of the state is to regulate positive and negative externalities. And students learning something is actually a (positive) externality. Neither the student nor the parent or even the district directly care about everyone learning basic skills - that provides no relative advantage for them. Signals of being superior are worthwhile to the individual. Those might actually result in the individual being smarter but if an individual is "selfish" or thinking in pure "homo-economicus" terms, they are just happy being able to always seem competent rather than being competent. So the state (or whatever institution can represent "all of society") is what is needed to increase the base competency of a society.