> Where did all the intellect go?

I think that's the key point. Decades of undermining the education system, plus many other problems such as "big money lobbying" is likely what led to such extremisms.

You know... the key metric of "education" used to be "what percentage of your population can read and write". By that measure, the US is fairly "educated". However, just like the value of each dollar goes down as the economy grows (i.e. inflation), I think it's important to apply a similar idea to education; just as the access to information increases, the value of _only_ being able to read and write is no longer enough to be considered as "educated".