> Schools in East Asia, alongside pushing STEM topics are still also vehicles for pushing the philosophical and cultural views of the state through the teachers and curriculum, so I'm not sure why this is befuddling as such.

Schools in the US, at least in theory, don’t teach the philosophical and cultural views of the society. This is a concession to the fact that the US is a multi-cultural society, so teaching values as such would be inappropriate. Kids therefore get some instruction in US history, civics, and government, but you can get through the whole sequence without learning anything about Christianity or Western Europe.