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I think it depends on what kinds of things you’re insisting are a culture. Most people, being essentially raised in those institutions from infancy have more time being taught the values, attitudes, and beliefs of their institutions and their cohort of similarly raised peers than their families of origin (although there are exceptions, most of which come from either purposely dropping out, or very strong and active counter programming). In that sense, despite democratic dressing, we essentially live in the thought experiments of Plato’s Republic or Brave New World. The average non-fundamentalist of any religion has essentially the same secular humanist, post enlightenment, consumerist world view. They all essentially believe in the same things, democracy (particularly liberal democracy), human rights, secularism, sexual liberation, and capitalism.
This is historically pretty weird. In times past, you could and often would find tribes just a few miles apart believing wildly different things, practicing wildly different religions based on wildly different assumptions. You’d also find it very difficult to force ideology and conformity on large populations. A Greek once tried to force the Jews to be polytheists. It didn’t work. Modern child warehousing has done wonders to de-Christianize the West, because it takes kids out of the home and spends hours teaching them that their parents are backwards and wrong.
You massively over estimate the uniformity of American beliefs. If you travel from NYC, to Salt Lake, to Phoenix, the rural Midwest, the values indeed differ massively and always have. The only reason it might seem otherwise is because people self segregate. Most people succeed in seeking out their ingroup where ever they go. If they can't succeed (Like culturally black people in Salt Lake) they generally avoid those spaces.
There is an underpinning of enlightenment (far more than "post enlightenment") values among most of the non hyper urban settings, but I don't think that is built all that much by the schools, but by basic American tradition. Myths are powerful, and the American myth is an exceptionally powerful myth, up there with the Christian and Muslim myths. The American mythos leaves a lot of space for disagreement though.
You seem to believe institutions like schools are far more effective than I do. They're very effective for a certain type of person--mainly the quiet kids who get good grades and follow orders. Those kids are basically selected for by their predecessors in government backed institution. After they are selected they have an outsized voice, but probably not an outsized functional impact. If they had an outsized impact the leftist institutions would likely not have to rely on immigrant votes to eek out a 50% win rate in elections.
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