“Blessed self appointed teachers” should not and cannot exist in any functional actually meritocratic system. In order for mass civic education to be effective there needs to be a core set of criteria for what constitutes a good teacher and a good citizen that all parties negotiate on and largely agree on (to the extent possible) that’s actually (not just superficially) bottom up and not imposed by social engineering types.
The exact criteria for what constitutes a good citizen can and should be varied based on location and can and should be driven by the values of any given local community. But there also needs to be a convergence on higher order values that can help negotiate between communities that have different values. A good education system needs to incorporate local community values while also fitting into a larger system.
That is incredibly difficult to achieve, and impossible to fully realize. But that should be the aim. What we have now is based off an old Prussian industrial model that is serving fewer and fewer people while also increasing disunity by preaching grievance. The education system could be much much better and both serve and be run by everyone in a much more unifying and cooperative way if there was better leadership, less inertia in the old system, and a much clearer and beneficial social contract at the foundation of the system.
> That is incredibly difficult to achieve, and impossible to fully realize. But that should be the aim.
What makes you confident that not fully realized version of your utopia does not end up being a dystopia? For reference, see what happened for the not fully realized utopia of communism in Soviet Union
Every functional organization throughout history has been some form of meritocratic system. Functional does not guarantee benevolence/a meritocratic system is neither utopian nor dystopian in and of itself, but some attempt at meritocracy is a prerequisite to being able to aim a system at all and keep it from causing harm through dysfunction.
Whether or not more local emphasis is better when talking about civic education is a much longer conversation. Determining what proper civic education should be is an extremely difficult balancing act. That difficulty and the long term ramifications of education is why I think it's likely to be THE most important problem in upcoming decades. In order to avoid dystopian outcomes that difficulty needs to be confronted honestly and pragmatically. Systems become most dysfunctional and dystopian when they pursue a vision without regard for pragmatic considerations and are willing to become increasingly "in debt" to a vision by doing things that are very bad in the short term to medium term for an imagined, non existent benefit in the long term. I think it's perfectly possible to aim a system in pragmatic directions towards actually viable paths to betterment which balance short, medium, and long term considerations without the type of indebtedness to vision that leads to bad outcomes. Those paths won't be perfectly defined, and the benefits might end up being modest. In short I don't think I'm advocating for anything utopian, just intentional, pragmatic, and in service of whatever best paths make themselves visible. I think we are not looking at paths which are much better than the one public education is currently on. Exactly how much better civic education could be is a big unknown, but my hope is that it could be drastically improved.
My answer to blessed self appointed "teachers": how about fuck you? We'll "figure how to be good citizens" on our own.