Was there a big failure of the education system at some point?
Yeah, it's called social media and social bubbles.
Conspiracy theories are not a regional or zeitgeist problem. They always existed throughout history and across regions. Modern social media just allowed people to find each other and organize more easily. If you think there is a certain part of the world that is "unaffected" you are wrong.
If you, for example, believed in a flat earth in the 1960s you learned to shut your mouth because you encountered resistance every time you talked about it. Today it's easy to find equally minded people and to become trapped into mechanisms that enpower and fuel your conspiracy ideas.
The amount of dangerous, bad ideas and ideologies that social media is allowing to wildly spread is shocking. When this pandemic started I got the same "chain letter" over whats app from german, swedish, polish and french contacts. All advising me to drink water every 15 minutes, because that way I'd swallow the virus and it wouldn't be able to effect me + other ridiculous "facts". All well meant and all as logical as "the earth is flat because I do not notice a curvature if I look 1km towards the horizon".
In the end, it does not necessary has something to do with education. I once meat a medical doctor who strongly believed that electrons do not exist. A clearly well educated person, that was able to finish one of the more difficult academic careers possible.