"She must have been putting him on."

Sorry, no, it's not hype and it's not propaganda.

As a group...
They don't know which states surround their own.
If you gave them a list of the Revolutionary War, the Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, they couldn't put them in chronological order, or even tell you what any of them were about.
They have no idea what a Periodic Table is.
They can't really tell the difference between 'receipt', 'recipe' and 'receive'.
They can't compose a grammatically correct sentence.
They don't know what a gross is, or how many cubic feet are in a cubic yard.
They don't know how to address an envelope.
They don't know how to balance a simple checkbook.
Even given all the information, they can't figure out a relatively real-life problem in logistics.

OF COURSE, their parents are partly to blame: THEY were brought up by the SAME school system! What would you expect?

I think it happened in Israel, where the schools copied the American way of education. A year or two later, the parents were screaming in rage, and insisted they go back to methods that work. Do you see the parents here complaining very much?

I heard that private schools are are quietly hiring more and more homeschooled instructors, because the system-educated ones are ignorant and inept.

Sue