Oh say can you REEEEEEEEEEE Yeah, fellow American here.  We've fallen so far from excellence.  I think our biggest mistake was in allowing authoritarian leftists control over our educational system at nearly every level for too long.  Instead of teaching kids how to survive in the real world, they've filled maybe 70% of the curriculum with things most people will never need to know in life, making school a giant waste of time, failing utterly to prepare students for the real world, and filling their heads with leftist ideology.  You couldn't design a better long term plan for destroying a nation from the inside.