Education cannot be instilled from without. It has to be sought from within.
Education is a tool. The most important part of a tool is the person holding it. Just forcing someone to hold a hoe will not make them swing it.
Learning and capability are not chronological. Forcing students to march through school in lock step is a mental remnant of the industrial age we are leaving behind. Our fascination with standardization and compartmentalization, the keys to industrial efficiency, do not translate at all to biological systems like society, the ecology, our economy, or education.
Not all people are good learners. Much of society would do much better with rudimentary education and a lot of hands on practical experience. You learn a lot more about life and how reality works that way than being forced to regurgitate a list of historical events. We are not all going to be rocket scientists no matter how many hours of school you force us to sit through.
We cannot all be above average.
School in our current society is really only glorified child care, which allows a greater portion of our society to engage in work outside the home.
This is not good for society.