Education Gap in Packaging?

The public education system in the US is a caste system where intelligent kids or ones with influential parents are steered into academic disciplines geared towards white collar work. This leaves the so-called dumb, unpopular, and/or lower socioeconomic class kids steered into vocational courses, which are precisely what is needed in manufacturing, but the vocational training in most schools is behind the times. The higher caste graduates college and obtain human resource/managerial positions which do the hiring for the factory floor but they have no idea of what is actually involved in manufacturing a product and assume that any idiot or illegal alien who can't speak or read English can walk in off the street and do the "idiot" work on the factory floor with virtually no training for little above minimum wage. Many corporate training budgets are spent on LEAN/Six Sigma type training, also geared towards management. This has led to manufacturers partnering with community colleges to train workers for the factory floor, which of course gets government involved, and that is hardly ever a good thing. So that leaves on the job training and apprenticeships where money could be wasted training people who lay out drunk, quit before their training pays off, or don't work out for some reason or another. I think the root cause of the problem is the caste system and this will not improve until Americans value manufacturing work again and bring manufacturing wages closer to parity with managerial pay scales.