It’s not education. Marin county, one of the best educated counties in the country with high tertiary education, have one of the highest proportions of anti-vaxxers.
Misinformation isn’t countered with education. It’s countered with counter propaganda -i.e. it’s not in a facts and figures type of way for you to make up your mind by attentively and discerningly studying data. No, it’s someone else offering ready to eat counter propaganda.
Btw, I would have you reconsider your careless use of the word antivaxxers, if anything ask yourself why is it so heavily promoted in media and what biases it carries? Again, I'm not against vaccination, but there is a lot to investigate about the context of how it is carried out. Kinds of conservation chemicals, optimum schedule, frequency and side effects of all this. You will find there is still quite some debate around this from more scientifically minded doctors.
Schooling is an avenue into education, and while 19th century prussia has been an influence, so has been montessori, humboldt and the 20st and 21st century reserach into pedagogy.
As for your comments on antivaxxer, they are called antivaxxers because they are anti-vaccination, don't care about the actual problems and and don't respond to the actual arguments. Doctors and researchers will always debate how to make vaccines better, because of course they will, we want better vaccines. There is also debate about when we can get away without vaccination, e.g. in the case of rabies where the vaccine is time sensitive, or malaria, where it doesn't make sense for norwegians to get them unless they visit the tropics and so they can spare themselves the side effects (which are acknowledged and worked on, see before) and society the cost. What you will not find, at all, is any honest scientific debate about whether the default should be to vaccinate or not. I don't know if you meant to imply this, but Poe's law acts here: even if you didn't you gave the antivaxxers a smidgen of credibility, by saying "you will find debate" in a way which could imply "and that means antivaxxers have some reasonable positions". They don't.
See also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#Effectivenes...
and this table: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2017106/tables/1
The US spends more on public education than any OECD country other than Norway.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Americans are kind of morons; pretty sure it has nothing to do with the amount of money we spend on education.
is there a reason why education spending in particular should be reported as a fraction of GDP? if you look at US military spending as a fraction of GDP, it's pretty unremarkable.
to me the numbers paint a pretty clear picture. the US already spends more to educate each student than most OECD countries. whatever the solution is to the problem, it's probably not to just throw more money at it.
If you think the US is a nation of dumbasses because of infotainment expenses and advertising, perhaps you have some evidence for this?
Students are taught the usual math, english, science, and history. If you want to teach critical thinking and analysis, you're going to need to either displace one of the subject matter or retrain how and what teachers teach.
There isn't enough hours in the day to squeeze in another subject in between high stake exam training and overloading students with homework.
Money doesn't seem to be the constraining factor here. Political reform are needed, and so is the support framework for training teachers to teach in yet "unproven" methodology.
It wont. This tactic worked for the Tobacco industry in the seventies, it worked for the cola industry in 2006, and it continues to serve diligently for oil and energy companies during climate change. This model of disinformation has also helped spread measles throughout the developed world through the anti-vax movement.
The problem is American education. You cannot spend 40 years cutting public education to the bone and turning colleges into profit mills without some sort of brain-drain. We've arrived in 2020 with a nation of citizens that lack the capacity for intelligent argument and critical analysis of ideas. This is also in large part due to the nature of how we get our information, namely as a "bleeds and leads" info-tainment format where our opinions are cultivated as a product of either 0 or 1, red or blue, liberal or conservative. The american opinion is largely an accessory of corporate advertisement in 2019.