unable to answer basic questions

Is all of this fake? Was the video edited to show only the ignorant ones? Is the stereotype about stupid American students true? What about the female stereotype (implied in the thumbnail) that The more they show off their tits, the dumber they are?

My take as a former (and possibly future) educator: it's a given that human intelligence follows a bell curve, and in a large population like the US's, where we have a third of a billion (legal) people, the number of stupid people will be concomitantly large.

At the same time, different types of knowledge (school knowledge, cultural knowledge, trivia knowledge, specialized knowledge, technical/artistic knowledge, etc.) also follow a bell curve. So in the US, you're bound to find a lot of stupid, unknowledgeable people.

"Stupid" is something of an ill-defined term. Does it mean a low IQ? Lack of common sense? Lack of emotional intelligence? Lack of success at life? Are the people featured in the above video necessarily stupid? It's possible. In fact, my teacher's brain is tempted to say yes. But if I try to be a bit more objective, I have to acknowledge that a lot of these dead-enders are probably that way not because of low IQ but because of poor education.

"Poor education" is also a vague term: it can imply a school system with low standards that teaches its students poorly; it can imply students who, for any number of reasons, willfully or as a function of personality refuse to or fail to pay attention while being taught. Who has failed? How can we tell? Such questions immediately become complicated, and it doesn't help when you have simpleminded people in the discussion who say things like, "Just put 'em all through the army, and they'll learn." The army gets its share of incorrigible, irreparable, mentally slow or damaged people, too—people who end up getting kicked out.

So in the above compilation, are we looking at stupid people? As I've noted before, one snide commenter suggested that a lot of these kids would be able to name all of the Kardashian sisters right away. These kids do possess knowledge of a sort. You learn what your mind focuses on; you absorb what you find interesting and relevant.

The real question is: do you construct education in such a way as to appeal to individual students' motivations, or do you demand that students all meet or exceed a single, objective standard? Finding an answer isn't that easy. The closest thing I've seen to a compromise between these two poles is gamification: most games inherently include motivators (e.g., the prospect of winning), and games can be set to certain objective standards. But there's a risk in gamifying: not all games are guaranteed to motivate everyone, and constant loss can generate learned helplessness.

I dance around theories of education in my book.