This is a popular venue for blame, but perhaps you haven’t yet met the highly respected scientists claiming that masks don’t work against covid, that AIDS wasn’t real, or that vitamin C cures everything —- these are all highly educated people who, in their fields, have a deep understanding of “theory of knowledge” and “scientific method fundamentals”.
But, they are also human, and suffer from the human biases: confirmation bias, various selection biases like survivorship bias, etc.
These, I think, are more likely the culprits — and if you can figure out how to solve those within the education system, please share!
For a start, schools could teach people about how we actually unravel truths from statistics. It's a bit unfortunate that one of the most famous books in the area is called "How to Lie with Statistics". But all those things you mention, did you learn them in school? No, you tend to learn the conclusions but not the reasoning behind.
What...is your point then?
Fake news isn't just a meme, it's a belief system. So how does a public school system tackle that?
>Just so you don't think that we had enough time at school to teach you everything.
Is there literally one person (in the US) who leaves a basic 12th grade education believing that they learned everything there is to learn?
You can disagree about what the evidence is, or what it means, despite having properly followed the principles of reasonable inquiry. The issue is more identifying when those principles haven't been followed. The problem is that school doesn't really get into the tug-of-war between different strands of thought, it's quite parochial: you are told there are galaxies, not about the great debate that led to us knowing that.
Every single individual within that group thinks "Wakefield is authoritative", and thinks that precisely and literally?
Might we be asking of others, that which we refuse to do ourselves?
I blame the education system. There's way too much specific knowledge that you will be tested on, and barely any theory of knowledge or scientific method fundamentals. And in the end, you will forget the silly quiz questions, leaving you with just the principles, if you were so lucky.
It would have been nice to have a general survey as well. "Not gonna quiz you on it, but FYI apart from the classic subjects that you are learning, there are also things like geology, materials science, a huge array of mathematical things, and so on. Just so you don't think that we had enough time at school to teach you everything."