Sadly, one could adduce many reasons this no longer remains true.
Sadly, one could adduce many reasons this no longer remains true.
"In the West, however, there was also an abrupt fall in the level of college and school education in physics and mathematics in the last 20-25 years, and in the USA the decline in school education was apparently particularly steep. I can clearly see that contemporary education cannot produce a theoretical physicist capable of passing Landau’s theoretical minimum." (http://www.mi.ras.ru/~snovikov/cris_en.pdf)
Basically, this education crisis seems to me to be endemic to developed societies. I don't have a clear thesis on this yet, but it seems that when a society progresses from "Education is a route from poverty to paradise" to the anti-liberal "Everyone should receive fourteen years of education" that the quality of education rapidly declines.
I see another problem. The bright are bored, school is tedious, and they go unrecognized. Then the less intelligent "excel."
Good thing AI research will need more and more intelligent people.