Abraham Lincoln went to a small, private school sporadically and largely educated himself through reading and the encouragement of his mother. He was a day laborer in an extremely poor family that spent an entire year living in what was essentially a lean-to. Since he didn't attend a public school, he must have been a menace to society by your theory. I'm sure we could have expected more of him if he had attended a modern public school.

Your entire argument for the benefit of public schools to society would make a lot more sense to me if the public schools achieved any reasonable academic goals for their students. Instead, they focus on politically correct issues and empirically failed ideas like whole word reading. From your other comments I see that you have a lot of excuses for this and lay blame on any students who manage to escape for lowering the quality of their remaining peers education-- as if public school education were some sort of mutual suicide pact. In that at least I agree with you!