Most of history was a very different place before advancements outright snapped assumptions in half. Before most of the population was farm laborers and societal hierarchical complexity and knowledge was limited by this.

Industrialization was raising pollution and standards of living and making it clear that a lack of education wasn't a healthy option - although partially driven by wrong reasons - paranoid anticatholicism that ignores basically all of European history of how much influence the church /actually/ has over secular power.

Even post WW2 industrialization the population was still at a high school diploma as an actual advantage but "optional".

We need more informed not less. Problematically the populace also needs more critical thinking and self guidance while there are many unhealthy attitudes towards learning.

If you look at the opportunities and statistics for high school dropouts, it makes a compelling case to the contrary.

And I argue this as an education system skeptic and college dropout myself.

Reading and writing are unnecessary for much of the population given the progress in speech to text and text to speech algorithms. We can go straight to learning how to express ideas in speech and learning how to locate, access and understand information.

And calculators have rendered arithmetic unnecessary for some time. The focus should be on how to use calculation for financial and technical purposes.

Most of history was pretty bad.