We don't teach it this way, but in the United States, the infrastructure for public education is bound up with land dispossession, genocidal capitalist expansion, indigenous removal, segrenomics, and the limits of imagined citizenship.

1785-The Land Ordinance created rules for the survey, sale, and settlement of land, reserving a portion of each new white township for a local school.
1787-The Northwest Ordinance is passed which specified how NW territories would become states.

Both ordinances assumed the U.S. had the right to sell, give away, divide and govern land that they knew full well did not belong to them. But it helped the founders create more citizens, then defined as white men with property/means.

In between those two ordinances, the U.S. established "reservations" for indigenous nations and began requiring indigenous children both be educated as Christians, workers and servants, and that their educations be paid for with grants of land.

This public education land grab continues in various ways but the point is, when talking about the founding of public education in the United States, we should tell the whole story about who the system and its founding both helped and hurt.