Parents and public school teachers have filled their heads with so much feel-good-about-yourself fluff without the real substance of education. Yep, I used to tutor kids in math to help them get ready for their SATs. A lot of them had had algebra in high school but weren't familiar with the commutative, associative and distributive laws. Consequently, they couldn't solve the simplest of problems. And many didn't want to learn, either.
They told me that they had been taught from the first grade onward that there were no right or wrong answers, and that everybody's approach to problem solving was equally valid. So why learn some stupid "laws?"
It's pitiful.
Ahh, but competition will sift these fluff-brained pansies. The current state of uneducation in American schools is but one of the heinous crimes of liberalism. Sanctioning laziness is another. It is an oddity of this age that 'lieberals' expect science to rescue and sustain a nation of designed mediocrity, yet science cannot be sustained in mediocrity. Thankfully, most people devoting their lives to scientific endeavors do so because they love the pursuit of knowledge and are thus likely to pursue science with zeal rather than mediocrity. And such minds tend to acquire the fundamentals in spite of our public education paradigm that champions mediocrity.