[wyager]

> An educated and critically thinking populace who can question and analyze information independently

To whatever extent this skill exists, it certainly can’t be acquired by going through the university system.

I suspect the most relevant characteristic here is the tradeoff between socially motivated consensus (where people believe whatever beliefs are minimally socially costly) versus observationally motivated beliefs. People’s position in this tradeoff space has little if anything to do with formal education; it’s probably heritable or trained through some social process we don’t understand. It might not be feasible at all to meaningfully push the population towards observational beliefs.