Alexandre Dumas disagreed with school?

Question

"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it."

Here, I think, Dumas uses the term "education" the same way "schooling" could be used.
Since, to most people, schooling means education.

I have noticed in several quotes that the word "education" can be replaced by "schooling". Although this is not done, because the thought of schooling being equal to the best education has been around for hundreds of years.
Did he mean...
Schooling works, but stupid men is its fruit.

Answer 1

Maybe Alexandre Dumas (the 19th century French writer and dramatist who wrote The Man in the Iron Mask and The Three Musketeers among other novels) meant that the observations of children can be so spontaneous, pure, honest and profound. Once school gets hold of them, they are "dumbed down" by convention and rote learning, stop thinking for themselves and start parroting others' ideas.
It sounds as if he was more critical of the educational INSTITUTION than of learning.

Answer 2

I don't actually know who Alex Dumas is, but it sounds to me like he could be refering to an older generation that didn't have school available to them or weren't able to go for some other reason contrasted to the new generation of kids that do have educational opportunities. The kids would pick up intelligence and knowledge much faster than their parents and outsmart them (though not in Wisdom) pretty quickly.

Or, the other possibility is that Alex is an incoherent lunatic who doesn't actually know what he says, and that it's no coincidence his last name sounds like "Dumbass".