>this is still okay as we can teach people to critically think and make their own decisions.
This is a nice fantasy but it fails to a number of intractible social problems. Children aren't taught skepticism because parents don't want their children to be taught skepticism. You would need to use force that you do not have access to in order to even attempt the solution you are proposing.
Second, implicit in your argument is that people would be responsible for thinking critically about every fact that they believe. This is just too much work, the human strategy requires trust, and we have massive incentive structures called societies whose main job is to facilitate that trust through the establishment of systems of incentives. This complicated system of incentives has been demolished, wholesale, by social media, and we're not going to adapt fast enough to avoid serious damage.
This is 100% true in a scary-large proportion of Protestant religious households. I don’t even mean the nuttier end like the Quiverfull folks or whatever, but much more common somewhat-more-religious-than-median-Protestant sorts, attending relatively normal churches.
Source: I ran which quite a few of that sort as a kid.
It could also be true of other religious groups (it definitely is with the even nuttier end of Protestants) like Catholics and Muslims or what have you, but that’s the part I have experience with, and that’s a lot of people. They don’t live in San Francisco or New York or Boston or Seattle, mostly, but they exist in numbers.
This is a nice fantasy but it fails to a number of intractible social problems. Children aren't taught skepticism because parents don't want their children to be taught skepticism. You would need to use force that you do not have access to in order to even attempt the solution you are proposing.
Second, implicit in your argument is that people would be responsible for thinking critically about every fact that they believe. This is just too much work, the human strategy requires trust, and we have massive incentive structures called societies whose main job is to facilitate that trust through the establishment of systems of incentives. This complicated system of incentives has been demolished, wholesale, by social media, and we're not going to adapt fast enough to avoid serious damage.