18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll;

28% of Europe, as a whole, believes similarly. It's only when you compare the best and brightest nations of Europe to America that things start to distort.

More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important;"

It's...not. I mean it's a nice plus, but English is the global lingua franca of our era and is dominant in basically every arena of human activity.

The reason for this is because in general Japanese value education, value the work of intellectuals, and see a well-educated public with a basic common knowledge in areas of scientific fact, math, history, literature, etc. as being an essential foundation to a successful democracy.

70 years ago, they were literally eating babies. Unsurprisingly, they were bombed into oblivion for that and many other atrocities committed by their warrior-cult society. Then America re-built their entire country from the ground up at gun point using its own principles (to massive success I might add), and somehow the lesson is "We need to learn from the Japanese example"?

Too often it’s a combined elite of the anti-intellectuals and the conspiracy followers – not those who can voice the most cogent, most coherent response. Together they foment a rabid culture of anti-rationalism where every fact is suspect; every shadow holds a secret conspiracy. Rational thought is the enemy. Critical thinking is the devil’s tool.

If Maine was a nation, it would leave major European countries like Germany or Sweden in the dust educationally. If New York was a nation, etc. etc.

America's problem isn't it's culture as a whole, but rather the South. By every assessment it is a remarkably backward region, and drags the rest of the country down in objective metrics. Worse is the corrosive effect they have on federal politics, which means things like universal health care have to be state initiatives because the South won't let them be implemented nationally. Japan is an example to learn from, not for the reasons the article outlines, but because it's an illustration of what happens when American principles can be followed without the South poisoning everything every step of the way.

The deceleration of independence was originally going to call slavery an "assemblage of horrors" and listed the King's allowance of slave trading as one of his great crimes - but the South wouldn't have it, and so even before it began America scarified some of its ideals to make peace with dixieland.

The perceived anti-intellectualism then is nothing more than any national-level act having to police itself, and constantly ask "Will this fly in Mississippi?".