A couple of things about public education:

First, when public education started in New England, it was all about making sure children could read... the Bible. There's a clause in a 1647 Massachusetts Bay Colony law mandating public education that begins "It being the chief project of old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures . . ." It was and is popularly known as The Old Deluder Satan Law.

Second, when public education took on new interest on a national scale, we are looking at the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the interest was two-fold: to train urban poor coming from rural areas to be good factory workers, and to get urban youth off the streets where they were being recruited into street gangs. The emphasis was never to produce independent thinkers, until...

Third, we encountered the two-fold phenomenon of the mid-twentieth century. Parents who had just finished fighting World War II were determined that their children would be taught to think critically, and thus not become like the Hitler Youth or the Young Pioneers, both of which horrified the GI Generation. (Also, having spent their youth following orders, they manifested a typical tendency to compensate in the other direction in their own childrearing.) That generation, our parents', was a prodigious builder of infrastructure. Its members believed in the groupwork with which they saved the world in the 1940s as youth. They built physical infrastructure (e.g., the interstate highway system), military/diplomatic infrastructure (e.g., NATO), and social infrastructure (e.g., an expanded public education system, to teach the huge Boomer generation, their children). This outlook was fine-tuned by the Sputnik reaction, which brought emphasis on science in the curriculum unlike anything that had been seen before... or has been seen since.

Attitude toward public education, and expectations for it, have changed gradually and dramatically in the 300 years since universal, compulsory, community funded education was first floated in New England. I personally have not experienced the political teachings in my education that you find so objectionable, nor have I encountered it with my children, so to me it does appear that you're speaking Swahili. Maybe it's a California thing. On the other hand, I have (as you know) experienced the scientific illiteracy of fundamentalist political activism first-hand, and I do know that it's very carefully orchestrated. The same song is sung over and over, in location after location. If we want the Sputnik Effect to be completely washed away, we need only sit back, say nothing and do nothing.