> make effective economic contributors in your society, rather than just being something you do because it's just what we do. That's your utilitarian take that

> make effective economic contributors in your society, rather than just being something you do because it's just what we do. That's your utilitarian take that would eliminate many things you would consider superfluous. Social sciences, history, art, useful personal skills that might not be directly to the economy (like home related stuff or questioning authority) It should be about empowering citizens in many ways regardless of how much they'll end up contributing to society. As for historical examples, women and wealthy people who studied and couldn't or didn't need to work still studied. If you subscribe to the purely resource exploitation view, you end up on the road to optimize for the elites in power through lobbying and corporate manipulation. Having a population that thinks for themselves may actually lead to more unrest and economic uncertainty of all the KPIs that corporations usually love. Of course, corps will want education to be a specialized training ground for future human resource exploitation and govs might want to create voters for their party (or nation build through ideology and principles) but just because either might get their way to a hig degree doesn't mean that "the primary purpose" is what they get away with.