Stop Stealing Dreams (what is school for?) - Seth Godin

Building a person’s character was just as important as reading,
writing and arithmetic. By instilling values such as obedience
to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the
time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for
future employment.
After a self-financed trip to Prussia, he instituted the paramilitary system of
education he found there, a system he wrote up and proselytized to other schools,
first in the Northeast U.S. and eventually around the country.
His second legacy was the invention of the “normal school.”
Normal schools were institutes that taught high school students (usually women)
the community norms and gave them instruction and power to go work for
common schools as teachers, enforcing these norms across the system.
His third legacy, one with which I find no fault, was banning corporal punishment
from schools. As further proof that his heart was ultimately in the right
place, the man who industrialized the public schools he created left us with this
admonition,
…be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for
humanity.
Unfortunately, that part of his curriculum is almost never taught in school.