Poorly educated, not exactly. He is however foreign, he was born and raised in New York before relocating to Brussels where his father, Stanley Johnson, was made Head of the European Commission's newly-established Prevention of Pollution Division. Johnson went to school in Brussels where he learned to speak French. He is steeped in the EU, through and through.
He comes across as shambolic, clownish and a buffoon, but he's nobody's fool. As well as being fluent in French he's also fluent in Italian and he can speak two of the three classical languages, namely Latin and Greek, and he's studied Hebrew too.
Later on Johnson won a scholarship to attend Eton, that's not easy, the scholarship was set up to capture the brightest who didn't have the financial means, he then went on to attend Balliol College, Oxford, where he became president of the Student's Union.
But to get back on track, I agree that Scylla and Charybdis is lost on youngsters, most of whom will think it might be an unsociable disease. In fact if you ask many whose education is of the last twenty five years, they won't be able to explain that the last four months of the year do not synchronise with their Latin names. Tell them that January & February are two added months and you will get blank looks.
Go further and prove that January is named after the two headed god, Janus, one head looking back at the old year, whilst the other head looks forward into the new one and you will get: "You what?"