I was educated during the 60's in private schools in England and the quality of teaching was very poor, much inferior to the grammar schools of the period.
Not that that's particularly representative of anything!
Ridiculously parochial.
We were a better educated generation than the one before (interrupted by ww2) and the one after who had substituted cathode rays for the its dopamine, and left the ability to read deeply and actively slowly behind them, as their brains became deconcentrated by eyeball-grabbing consumerism.
Parallel with the growth in size and number of billboards blocking the view of the countryside as one motored through it. Once relatively polite requests to try new products became screechy and deliberately annoying, frying young brain cells from womb to tomb.
The Mad Men years...
It's ramped up beyond all recognition since then, leaving average concentration capacity to near zero in this existentially restive postmodern era of the impermanent Now and eternal Wow.  .

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty