If you view education as teaching people to learn, then you might have an argument that education rates enable and empower people. If you're training robots who don't think for themselves then you'll encounter the situation you've just described.
Empowerment carries a fairly high risk and if you are already in a poor economic situation, you a very likely to not be able to tolerate it. Plenty of people in good economic standing aren't willing to tolerate it. As such, most people are going to end up choosing the far less risky path of being "robots" anyway.
