A well penned essay. The thrust of your advice, as I see it and completely agree, is to develop the critical thinking skills that schools no longer teach kids. I also agree that it is by design, even though I don’t necessarily believe the teachers are complicit in that design; I think they are under pressure from lack of funding and demands to keep test scores high for an empty show to manipulate taxpayers. The system leaves teachers with little recourse than to teach to the tests and conformity, rather than help kids learn critical thinking and educational growth.

This line rather says it all:

Nothing is fact until you have personally verified the information that makes it so.

Honestly, it often looks to me like we are seeing the systematic dismantling of democratic ideals, only to be supplanted by a Dominionist theocratic corporate feudal state where we are all expected to shut up and work until we die. In the States, it’s been happening in slow motion since Nixon’s Southern Strategy and seems to be in overdrive for the past decade.