If I tell a child who knows squirrels are usually white, brown, grey or black, and say "hey look! A purple squirrel!", chances are the child will think I'm fooling around. If I say the same thing to a child who has never seen a squirrel, he's more likely to turn his head without doubting my words.

Is knowing the possible colors of squirrel fur an innate trait, or is it something that is learned?

I agree, critical thinking is difficult to teach directly. I can't tell the child-- or an adult for that matter-- to foretell something he doesn't know. The focus of Education is knowledge in various fields like politics, history, physics, mathematics, linguistics, etc.

I was an academic as well. Some classes were certainly funded, maintained and encouraged because of ignorance or political reasons. The entire educational system were I live was reformed based on political reasons. The pilot study in numerous schools failed miserably 20 years ago. The results were never shared with the public before its nation wide implementation. The reform is still in place today. The only copy of the evaluation I know of is a university library and was printed by the professor who was its director and who was subsequently demoted. This happened in a G8 country. Universities are far from immune from selfish or poor decision making.

Try telling the 100000+ homeless students in NY that ignorance is a deliberate choice. Maybe it is a deliberate choice for those in power to dictate others' ignorance. It's also tough being a good learner when you're both a full time worker and student.

When I was a student, I remember not being particularly interested in listening to TA drones regurgitate empty words either, especially when I was sleepy.

> Try telling the 100000+ homeless students in NY that ignorance is a deliberate choice.

Let's not lose sight of the subject of the article, which is disinformation, promulgated for example via Facebook and Twitter. There's no evidence that this issue is correlated with homelessness. In fact the people who eat up the disinformation tend to have easy access to internet and television. If homelessness were the problem, then solving homelessness would solve disinformation, but there's no reason to think that's the case. You're more likely to hear internet disinformation repeated in a country club than on the streets.

Lack of financial access to a good education is of course a severe societal problem. But it's not the heart of the matter here, specifically.

> It's also tough being a good learner when you're both a full time worker and student.

It's tough, but in my experience the people who work full time and go to school simultaneously tend to be the most motivated. They want to learn, even if they struggle to find the time, otherwise they'd just drop out. The laziest students are often the ones with plenty of free time, which they spend on partying, sports, and other leisure as opposed to studying.

However, as I suggested in another comment, college is probably too late to reach most kids. If you don't start working on them earlier, they're already set into a lot of bad attitudes and habits.

There is plenty of evidence indicating socio-economic status correlates with educational outcomes. Wouldn't you agree victims of disinformation are those least equipped to tell apart facts from fabrications? Isn't it the heart of the issue? The article unfairly refers to a "nation of idiots". Aren't many "idiots" responsible for electing the likes of the current American, English or Brazilian leaders. What is the solution? Taking the "idiot's" power away isn't democratic, it's a speedway to totalitanism. Protecting the "idiots" from disinformation is impossible: plenty of money sees benefits in compromising the people, it will find a way. Quality initial and continuing education is possible and democratic. Democratic societies are founded partly on the idea of the aware citizen. When are we victims of disinformation? When we decide to believe something that we know little about. It's easy: we all need a representation of the world. If all we are given are fabrications, we will never make it out of the cave. The idea is at least as old as Plato or the first democracy.

> There is plenty of evidence indicating socio-economic status correlates with educational outcomes.

Of course, but not sure how that's relevant here.

> The article unfairly refers to a "nation of idiots".

Not sure that's unfair.

> What is the solution?

What if there is no solution? What if "Idiocracy" was accurate? Or "Planet of the Apes"? Science "fiction" is rife with stories about how humanity ended up destroying itself, especially via technology. It's not like we haven't seen this coming for a long time.

> Of course, but not sure how that's relevant here.

The relevance is fairly obvious in my previous comments. See the child who knows of squirrels example. Here is an excerpt from the article that speaks for the relevance:

"For people, patching means education. And not the worker-prep kind of education where you learn how to be an obedient and productive office worker, but the kind that teaches the fundamentals of how things work—from physics to psychology, and from physiology to philosophy."

> Not sure that's unfair.

Many people grow up in terrible conditions and are never given a proper chance to acquire a decent education. It's not especially fair or helpful to insult them.

> What if there is no solution? What if "Idiocracy" was accurate? Or "Planet of the Apes"? Science "fiction" is rife with stories about how humanity ended up destroying itself, especially via technology. It's not like we haven't seen this coming for a long time.

Possibilities aren't definitive. Promoting hopelessness and fortune telling doesn't seem very appealing. It leads to negative outlooks and self-fulfilling prophecies that aren't in anyone's interest.

> Many people grow up in terrible conditions and are never given a proper chance to acquire a decent education. It's not especially fair or helpful to insult them.

Hasn't it become painfully obvious by now that the upper class is full of "idiots" too? There's a kind of smug complacency that can arise from being comfortable. One is never forced to question one's assumptions.

You keep trying to pivot to poverty, but there's little reason to think that's the problem. I attended a well-regarded high school in a fairly wealthy suburb, and the ratio of "seat fillers" was about the same there as you'd see anywhere else. It just seems to be human nature, a normal distribution.

I'm not saying every education is the same. There are clearly better and worse schools. I'm saying that even when you give everyone in a group the same education, the results still tend to vary widely.

The reason I emphasize "seat fillers" is this: there are a lot of things you can teach a student by forced rote drilling. But it seems to me that critical thinking is uniquely not one of them. Isn't critical thinking the opposite of rote forced drilling? I wonder, then, how much critical thinking can even be taught to unreceptive students.

In fairness, maybe we just start way too late? I mean, I'm all in favor of debates over the existence of God for example in elementary school, at the same age kids start getting forced to go to Sunday school. But a lot of parents would have fits over that topic in public schools, which is why we can't do it until college, at which point it's unlikely to make much difference.

The formative years of a child are almost completely under control of the parents. It's a chicken and egg problem, because it's difficult to change the public education policy without the consent of the parents who themselves were not raised to think critically. There's near universal agreement that math education is important, but "critical thinking" is controversial at best among parents. A lot of them would rather home school their kids than allow exposure to different ways of thinking.

The contextual backdrop is never negligible, but it's the powers that be that change the course of the world. Secularization has been seen as the step forward. So has quality initial and ongoing Education for all. We trudge forward as individualistic pursuits erode those of the collective.

It reminds me of a study: many groups undertake a turn-based team game in which the prize grows until a certain maximum. Make it to the end of the game: everyone takes an equal part of the prize home. At any point before the end, the entirety of the current prize can be claimed by one individual. Not in one single group was the prize shared. There was always at least one person who waited long enough to claim more than what would have been shared otherwise.