Totalitarianism is usually associated with an omnipresent state which enchains the individual with iron manacles of edicts, orders, and regulations. The voracious appetite of government and its eager use of coercive power make citizens into slaves whose lives are the property of those who rule rather than serve the people.
This is a grim reality in most of the world. Government power is like gravity in a black hole: it relentlessly and mindlessly accumulates more and more mass over time. Moreover, because the rationale for this power is to protect the people — and if people were doing well, that rationale would vanish — totalitarian government makes sure that nothing it does really makes life better. So while public education is touted as a panacea for social ills, state education administrators and politicians in their pocket resist reforms which would make schools work and insist that more money and authority over the lives of our children is the policy allowed.