So, students can't read or write and are MORONS but they feel VERY, VERY good about themselves.
Do you think things have changed much?
The reason? Educators decided that math and science were unnecessary.
Being math teachers, they were in the minority of students/humans and found the traditional way of teaching arithmetic, drills, memorization of facts and emphasis on getting the correct answer both boring and stifling. They thought and still think that the ‘best’ way to teach math is the way they naturally learned it, by discovering the, to them, beautiful patterns inherent in mathematics.
When I first started teaching in the early 70s, Modern Math was the new and improved thing. I can remember teaching poor 4th and 5th graders how to compute in base six. Forget memorizing the times tables, add 4 + 2 to get 10, base 6.
You can’t do fractions easily if you don’t know your times tables as well as your own name. Memorization of times tables is now very frowned upon.
Science teachers to a lesser extent followed a similar path. Rather than have students memorized basic science facts, the modern way is to ‘let the kids discover them on their own.
Add these flaws to the current idea that every kid has to pass no matter how little he or she does in class and you have university students who cannot do fractions, which when I was a nipper was considered a skill to be mastered in the 5th grade.