Scientists, with the possible exception of Einstein, have never been much admired by most young people. And those who admire Einstein seldom understand the least thing he said. The cult of celebrity may indeed be more prevalent now, but it was the same when I was a kid and that's a long time ago.
Americans, like the rest of us, get what they want from the "infotainment" business. If no one watched/read/listened/googled, it would die away or at least be vastly reduced.
My grandson goes to a Christian school. This is a pretty "fundamentalist" school, too. So far, he hasn't come up against the "creationism" vs "evolution" thing: he won't, until probably grade 11 or 12. But right now, he's studying erosion. And right there in the "church approved" textbook he uses, they discuss rocks dated as being over 3.5 billion years old.
I don't care whether there was a god who started it all, it has nothing to do with me. I'm more interested in what happened after the beginning - and the beginning I mean is not life on earth, but the beginning of this universe. I think it is entirely reasonable to speculate that all life on earth had a common ancestor - there is simply no other explanation that makes sense. If it was god's idea, then it was a good one. There is no way of knowing.
halplm's objections to what is taught in school seem nonsensical to me, since his objections seem to be based on very limited data. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".