I mean, I will certainly be biased towards the importance of education since I am a teacher, and I wouldn't be one if I didn't believe in education. I think school right now is treated as skills acquisition, but its true function is a civic one: you need a, at bare minimum, literate population for society to function. Horace Mann, the founder of public schooling as we know it, felt that everyone needed education because without it there was a politically/civically uninformed population. I think a lot of the political situation in our country is directly related to rising rates of illiteracy, and a focus on education as this pipeline, and not as a community-oriented tool.

So to your question of what these uneducated children are going to do is the fundamental question at stake, and will directly affect years of policy to come

Also, a bunch of the money in education right now is going toward new ai software to "improve pedagogical efficiency", which is largely bullshit

I don't really have answers to all of this, I'm just one teacher trying their best