Yeah that went south... but anyway, I think a better response is that you have no way of knowing if you succeeded because of public schooling, or in spite of it. And the same can be said of almost any human... we just don’t know how effective our current school system is compared to the vast diversity of alternative models that could exist. Sure, kids generally learn to read and perform arithmetic, but at what cost?
I don't think our system is the best, most effective, or even, in many cases anything above the bare minimum. There are probably a lot of interesting alternatives out there, and I would love to see some sort of change because I absolutely despised high school.
But, the bare minimum is good enough to get kids prepped to continue within the public higher-education system, and they can more-or-less take it from there.
Even if you go to a terrible high-school, it is generally functional enough for you to enter a community college, no SAT required. From community college, you can transfer to a good state school. The mechanism exists to take kids from mediocre schools, get the ones who are interested up-to-speed in a less chaotic environment, and put them into a state university, without them being super-geniuses or 1,000% intrinsically motivated or something.
It's not perfect, but it's a government program that gets millions and millions of kids who'd rather be playing Fortnite or hanging out at the skate park to at least learn the bare minimum in a somewhat standardized way.
The socioeconomic limitations on kids trying to progress through that system is a different thing, and that's a hurdle that I don't know that we have functional systems in place to deal with.
