Serious question: do you feel that critical thinking is important and should be taught in schools?

If so, consider how that itself is a "belief" that has at times been explicitly rejected by local political parties.

In other words, there's no such thing as value-neutral education.

Every environment teaches people implicit lessons about the people that create, run, and equally importantly populate the system. From my own experience in public school most of the life lessons on offer were kinda bad because the environment was defective and abusive and the people fucked up.

The idea that its possible to get hundreds or thousands of people together and only teach facts is absolutely impossible.

It's true, but it's a good aim.

"Facts can be effectively taught without incorporating beliefs" is a sentiment held by people egregiously unaware of their own biases

It's a good aim. It's not something you can necessarily encode in law.

sure! facts like:

- unfair power structures disproportionately harm those without power

- including everyone in decisions about the allocation resources is an effective way to solve disparity

- communities that form rules to govern themselves are more just and fair than communities where rules are formed by a minority

1.)Does anyone contest that? 2.)I love all those places that have disparity solved. 3.)Does anyone contest that?

If history and fables lend themselves to revealing these lessons through metaphor and tales of human struggle, the seeds for learning from them will be much more successful at growing than if the seeds are planted with a bludgeon.

It would be nice if my school didn't treat my child like a mindless robot to be programmed and instead provided context with content.