So while some specific details of this might be an "Americal obsession", there is definitely a general trend beyond USA.

Yep, that's a good point.

From a selfish cost:benefit analysis -- the more advanced civilization, the more is there to learn, but you have a higher quality of life even if you learn nothing. So depending on one's priorities, ignoring education could be a rational choice. Maybe when you are an average person, it does not make much sense to learn, because an average educated person will not make so much money anyway. It makes more sense to learn if the ability to learn is your competitive advantage.

My point was more on the disparity. For me, being qualified boosts my pay from the typical wage of Eastern Europe to good qualified labourer wage of the richest country, if I am actually good. For those born with more privilege in the today's world, the non-educated pay is several times larger but the ceiling is the same (and is much more reachable without having to actually put work into studying).

From a society point of view -- educated people are a positive externality to a society they live in. Most of the benefit of your education does not end in your pockets, but improves the lives of people around you, whether in positive sense (you invent or produce something they can use, you are a smart employee they can employ cheaply) or just in negative sense (you avoid some stupid choices which would have negative effects on people around you).

But is society capable of having a point of view and promoting it? I don't think that is working.

And that is the attitude towards education issue.The necessity of actual motivation and work is ignored. There is that vague belief in the ideal self that is held back by something which you can easily fix by attending some sort of ritual self improvement, and a plenty of people offering (scientology, nxivm, etc), and at the much grander scale, the ineffective higher education which sells tokens of endorsement in forms of increasingly meaningless diplomas.

The cultural attitude is vaguely anti-intellectual (The young physicists are people into star trek and videogames, wanting to but entirely unable to date a woman several steps below them on the social ladder, is the premise of a popular comedy show, for instance. This is very ridiculous). And that is, to some extent, a phenomena in all developed countries. It's not even so much that it is anti-intellectual as, well, who would want to be mr. Bean? What do you get if the science characters are the stock mr Bean of comedies? Humans are social creatures, and being laughed at is something most humans instinctively avoid. It's bad enough that the education takes time and there are more and more shinier distractions everywhere; it's bad enough that if you want to study you would have to not go to parties as much as the other kids; but to add to it the low status on the laughing ladder?