I think minimal standards are a pretty good idea, for both mental and physical education. The attitude that all children should be able to reach these standard

I think minimal standards are a pretty good idea, for both mental and physical education. The attitude that all children should be able to reach these standards, and if they don't that's the fault of the educational system, also makes a lot of sense. What those standards should be is a matter for debate, but if we look around the world (China ahem) we might get some ideas about what the competitive level is currently. To enforce this, you need to do two things: fire underperforming teachers, and their administrative overseers if the problem is pervasive, and pay teachers competitive salaries to attract the best talent to the job. Teaching is a skill, and highly skilled people should be well-compensated for their work. This is just labor market 101. If you don't value education, you pay low salaries to educators and you scrape the bottom of the talent barrel. If you do value education, then you make the job competitive by offering high salaries and eliminating underperformers. Of course, maybe the politicians and bureaucrats and corporate executives don't actually want a highly educated competent population? Perhaps they'd prefer dumb sheep who believe whatever propaganda they're fed and whose consumption habits can be easily directed by skilled advertisers and marketers. Herds of compliant consumers who do as they're told, that's perhaps what elite leadership is after. Might be a conspiracy theory but there's some truth to it I think. What it really looks like is one set of schools for the aristocrats, and another set of schools for the serfs, and it's more about maintaining a certain class structure, just as in late 19th / early 20th century British schooling systems.