Yes, my memory of high school is that everyone including the adults celebrated sports, and hardly anyone gave a crap about the high academic achievers, who were often social outcasts.
I spent a lot of my childhood trying (though largely failing) to pretend that I was not so smart. I can't speak for other countries, but anti-intellectualism is widespread in the US.
For a couple decades a majority of people in the US had effectively gotten coupons for half-off everything they desired.
It wasn't normal, but it made those generations in the US so mentally lazy that it effectively poisoned huge swaths of the following generations, fooling them into thinking it was always going to be that easy. So now we're trying to sort out exactly why those born and raised in the US are doing so poorly now.
Anyone who wanted a job got a good paying job. It was possible in those days for the average American to support a household as the sole breadwinner. What is happening now is that those halcyon days are over. Things are more competitive. We have not approached the cut throat levels as they have in South Korea. American jobs today pay less and have less benefits than in the 1950s. We are headed towards a two tier economy. Full time employees with benefits. Gig workers who wander from job to job with no benefits.
Because they don't value their kids being good at academics.
I've lived in multiple countries. In the non-US ones, people don't brag about being bad at math (even when they are bad at it). As an adult, if you couldn't add/subtract/multiply two large numbers on paper without a calculator, that would not reflect well on you.