Re: "I honestly don't see why a plumber could not or should not be curious about Proust or Bernoulli" - but they're more likely to be curious about (say) Led Zeppelin. (The plumber who recently installed my new Worcester-Bosch boiler could be described as a 'Led Zeppelin scholar'. And he introduced me to them.) And what's wrong with that? Furthermore such an interest doesn't require one to deprive themselves of income for four of the best years their life just to become a "bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, with lots of learned lumber in his head" (Pope)

I think that anything other than a functional view of education is itself elitist. (What is your alternative to a "functional view"? Idealist?) So I disagree that a functional view of education is necessarily "classist" - it's utilitarian.