What should public education be?

I am on the Boothbay Peninsula in Maine. Maine is a constitutional Home Rule State, but Home Rule barely has any power, at least not in my community, because money is what the leadership follows. 

In 1976, seven years after Home Rule was voted into the Maine Constitution in 1969, the Legislature deemed that "centrally managing the economy is an essential government function" ( which must be done by a public-private relationship). Centrally managing the economy means centrally managing everything.

The Maine Constitution prohibits the Legislature from chartering corporations by special act of legislation, with two exceptions, one for municipal purposes (municipal charters) and the other if the object of the corporation cannot be achieved another way (as in the private sector). That constitutional prohibition has been repeatedly ignored, and so we have a massive state industrial complex as the state takes more and more latitude with "centrally managing the economy."

Now, the state industrial complex has statutorily set itself up to use our public educational system as its industrial job training facilities. In the newly chartered Maine Space Corporation, the legislature provides that the state will use the public school system as industrial job training starting in Kindergarten. I think that is called indoctrination, not education.

By so doing, the state is dipping into property taxes to finance its industrial complex.

Ever since the state has been centrally managing the economy, the wealth divide has expanded year after year. At the pivotal core of the wealth divide is home ownership. When corporate culture stopped being good for its promise of making home ownership accessible, the workers started revolting against the corporate dream. When home ownership stops being in reach of everyday people, that's when the culture morphs into an ownership, working-class divide, and moves toward feudalism.

By adding industrial job training to public educational costs, local property taxes go up, and the bottom level of income for home affordability drops out.

At the same time, the type of education that creates well-rounded, civically minded citizens declines. In Maine statutory law says the public school must teach the Maine and US Constitutions, but that isn't happening. Statutory law says the public education system is supposed to teach indigenous education and about genocide- that isn't happening either. : Leadership just follows the laws that suit them and ignores the rest.

I believe that using the public school system for industrial job training benefits special interests while cost-burdening others. Furthermore, I believe that at this moment in our history, when a totalitarian form of government is trying to usurp democracy that we need a well-educated citizenry in intellectual pursuits that are inclusive of political philosophy. I see people throwing around political identifiers that I do not think they understand at all.

I believe that public education should be limited to what serves the common good, and that industrial job training should be paid for by those who benefit from it. 

To make a long story short, there has been a cultural war going on, led by developers who see the school system as a tool of their development ideas, but that plan was defeated by a public vote. Now there is a new round of discussion emerging- that includes the options of merging with other municipalities for a larger school system, among others- but I do not see a discussion about what education should be. If a town is going to merge its education with another town, there has to be a way of determining if the people of the towns are on the same page.

So I think there should be a questionnaire that all the people in the town can submit.

I am not sure what should be on the questionnaire. I am not in Town leadership, but we have one very fortunate forum in our Town, which is our local newspaper, The Boothbay Register, and that is where the people's conversation thrives.

A good way to start is to ask Claude AI. I was impressed when I gave Claude a simple prompt, and the answer I got made me wonder if Claude was reading my mind since he expressed many of my thoughts that were not included in the prompt about my idea for Business in Residence zoning. You can read the prompt and the links to the answers in My Letter to the Editor, titled 

A self-perpetuating, middle-class-building engine+

The Business in Resident Zoning is a different but related idea.

Any ideas for a questionnaire about the purpose of our public educational system?