GM, I think that education - for as long as formal education has been available - has been focused solely on providing an academic grounding with the occasional foray into practical life skills such as cookery and woodcraft . We may be about to see a significant shift in terms of equipping children through school with skills in matters such as financial management/household budgeting and care of self/offspring but it is tokenistic and the PSHE curriculum is overly broad (imo) and sometimes patchy. However this is beyond the point.
Parents themselves do not have the skills to raise their children well or even adequately in many cases. Education has never focused on equipping any of us with the personal skills needed to do the job of parent well. For many, such skills have been acquired through luck. This is why one meet a 'well educated' (in the sense of how we still judge and measure educational standards), academic man - let's say he is a lawyer or a banker with high earning power. It is likely that his education has played a major part in his 'success'. However, this same man could quite easily (ime, commonly) be utterly hopeless at playing with his children. So often I have seen lack of parental self esteem and confidence undermine everything else that is good in a family.
Lack of self esteem underpins domestic abuse, poor academic achievement, inability to recognise, set or operate within boundaries. It affects children and adults alike in the way it operates as a legacy of inadequacy.
So, now that we have learned from the post war era that caning and physical abuse further damages individuals and quashes brilliance and confidence, disallowing success and achievement we have left ourselves in a confused state of fear of boundaries, fear of consequence. One where accountability is a bad word. With this societal back drop, no matter how excellent the curriculum set by Government, teachers and schools have not a hope in hell of imparting much of that excellence to those children who have most suffered from this failure to address effectively the issue of self esteem.
We may have learned that encouragement, love and support for our children is crucial but we have interpreted this as a need to leave our children unfettered and alone in trying to establish perosnal boundaries and the ability to self regulate; partly because nobody gave us a new rulebook when they threw away the one on corporal punishment and children being seen and not heard and partly because our own confidence and esteem had been damaged by those parents and teachers of our childhoods where humilation was a technique and smacking was a method so that we are unable to recognise safe love and restriction and consequence setting. We do not know how to give criticism kindly, to offer thought out consequences of unacceptable behaviour so we leave children be in the name of love, letting them become obese, under educated and disrespectful of any sort of authority at all
And so the (lack of) self esteem legacy continues with the children who are now being loved; unguided and unboundaried wondering why nobody bothered about them enough to set those boundaries and enforce some set of rules.