who failed American students?

You saw the video I linked to in my previous post, in which one dumb cunt after another fails to answer the sorts of questions that, by rights, elementary schoolers ought to be able to answer. Does this mass enstupidation have a root cause? 

The temptation, of course, is to think reductively, i.e., to boil everything down to a single causative factor.  Humans love simple solutions, especially to complicated problems. We take comfort in simplicity. One could say, for example, that the teachers all somehow failed these students. One could say that the students, lacking motivation (and in many cases, simple smarts) failed themselves. One could point the finger at "parents" or more generally at "family." One could zoom back a bit and say "the system" or "the culture" failed, whatever that's supposed to mean. Whatever the cause or causes might be, the results are obvious in these (probably cherry-picked) man-on-the-street interviews.

I'm as guilty of reductive thinking as anyone else (note my sloppy use of the word stupid), but the reality is that these kids are as clueless as they are because of a whole constellation of factors, including the abovementioned ones. As an aside, I should also note that, while the video focuses on stupid Americans, this sort of ignorance isn't unique to America by any means. I've lived in France, Switzerland, and Korea, and I've traveled through plenty of other countries; if there's one thing I've learned, it's that troglodytes and bumpkins are everywhere, and no one particular country is especially ignorant or stupid. Inside any given country, you've got the standard bell curve of knowledge-education-intelligence. Most folks are normies; some are super-smart/educated, and some are super-dumb/uneducated.

Someone should do man-on-the-street interviews that are completely unedited, just so we can see a true cross-section of local humanity. That said, the previously linked video does the job of making young Americans look depressingly dumb, whether they mostly are or not.