It is borderline illiteracy indeed. I think the complacency is probably due to how they were thought at school. I say this because currently I live in a country that is not my own and have attended a few courses here (including a 2 year one). On my own country I was educated with an attitude of: here is the basics, go find the rest for yourself, which involved a lot of work, self-research and learning. Where I live now, studying actually frustrated me because they give you the answers to everything and my colleagues were still complaining it was too much work and hard!!
I mean, they would have course work where the structure was given to them and they only had to fill in the spaces!! I was baffled how can someone learn anything at all with this type of education, since it does not stimulate learning at all, but simply memorization. No wonder they finished the course feeling they had learned nothing, when all they had to do was adapt what was shown to them on an exercise to the final coursework! This could have been a specific situation with a particular teacher, but no, its standard education here.
On the flipside, my work and learning habits made me easily the best classmate with the most fleshed out coursework who was seen by the others like some kind of genius lol. Not at all, they were just incredibly bad! None of them would have made it till the end on my home country with that attitude, that's for sure. Not talking about young people either, most were 30+ years old.
