[jessaustin]

Judging solely on the number of HN commentators who are absolutely incapable of detecting irony or satire, and indeed who may feel those are entirely out of place on HN, the average citizen isn't capable of considering two mutually contradictory propositions at the same time, let alone becoming "well-informed". The various exhortations in this thread to "just teach them!" bespeak a similar innocence. We have a rather large number of trained professionals engaged in the teaching already, so such pleas should at the very least be accompanied by considerations of why those efforts have not yet sufficed.

[labster]

Dialectics are hard, man.

But to be fair, the longer we get into the current era of politics, the harder it is to distinguish between earnestness and satire. Young people who watch the movie Network today don't see Howard Beale as satirical, because there are too many people like him today who are deadly serious.

[mistermann]

Critical thinking, specifically, is taught on a widespread basis?

What country are you writing from, and could you give some specific examples?

[jessaustin]

Most of our high schools despair of teaching mathematics to the level of algebra, to most of their students. Many haven't yet despaired of conveying literacy to those same students, but the outcome is by no means certain. I would consider both of those prerequisites to "critical thinking", no matter what particular idiosyncratic definition of that phrase you might prefer. Therefore I suggest that we aim lower, for a sort of animal suspicion that comes naturally to all humans. The result, from the perspective of political harmony, will be the same: hundreds of millions of critical thinkers would not magically all arrive at the same conclusions on any set of topics. In a perfect world of critical education, not only would you still disagree with most people's conclusions, but you would also still disagree with how they arrived at those conclusions.