[Today's] schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to the career, which is to say the future, of the child. The orientation is thus necessarily theoretical, speculative, and mercenary. The child is not educated to return home and be of use to the place and community; he or she is educated to leave home and earn money in a provisional future that has nothing to do with place or community. And parents with children in school are likely to find themselves . . . made useless to them, by the intervention of new educational techniques, technologies, methods, and languages. School systems innovate as compulsively and as eagerly as factories. It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, "educators" tend to look upon the parents as a bad influence and wish to take the children away from home as early as possible. And many parents, in truth, are now finding their children an encumbrance at home, where there is no  useful work for them to do, and are glad enough to turn them over to the state for the use of the future.

Wendell Berry, "The Work of Local Culture," from What Are People For?