I don't think it is reasonable to lay this at the feet of the education system. In fact, it is somewhat difficult to lay this at the feet of any system, to be honest. It is a systemic failure of both the system, and the people who depend upon it to do either what they can't do, or what they wish not to do.

As for the system encouraging people to get a job, it is just responding to popular sentiment. The gauge people use for evaluating any educational system, public or private, is the number of people who move along to the next step of a pre-determined timeline. If you are in secondary school, you move on to college; if you are in college, you move on to employment. It's not that the schools want people to not learn, it's that the people who rely on the schools don't care if the schools foster this attitude. It's not that we are actively trained to be beholden to the executives of society; it's that we apathetically punt to them, because we just don't give enough of a damn, or believe that it is worth giving a damn. You have to believe something is worth caring about before you will expend energy to care about. It just isn't that important to us, as a general population, because we believe it won't make a fucking difference anyway. So we punt, and so do the schools.

I daresay that the sense of accomplishment from solving a problem or truly learning something is a universal human response.

It may be, but never underestimate the power of socialization in general upon any sort of universal human response. There are so many things we have elevated to the level of faux pas; is it really such a stretch to believe that demonstrated learning could not be elevated to the same level?

It is easy to cast aspersion at the system, but it is worth digging several levels of implication deep, and seeing how much of the system is just a reflection of ourselves.