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It's the old adage, Craig, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink". For all too many, you can give them the information they need to learn, but if they don't want to learn they won't listen to you. What makes it worse is when you get ideas that appeal to their sense of "reality"...ideas that have been made palatable to their "common sense" or that resonate with them in some fashion, once they get them into their heads and have them confirmed by others with the same delusion, no matter what you try to do, you can't shift them. It's religious in nature. Once that sets in, the only way for them to change is if something major happens that completely takes the wind out of their sails.
The US is not the best country in the world to hold up as a paragon of educational virtue or common sense in its truest meaning. You only have to look at the society and the way it conducts itself, the standard of general knowledge and even of specific knowledge in the country. They are fortunate in that they can throw huge amounts of money at problems because in that country (as in many others) it's a case of so many having to rely on the very few to sustain their knowledge base. Unfortunately, they are failing at that, miserably, because ideologies that have no business being allowed to promulgate in a knowledge driven, secular society are infiltrating their entire system...education, government etc. Belief and blind faith can be very dangerous things.
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