[safety1st]

I would start by simply putting everyone through a course in deductive reasoning at the earliest age possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

From there you can go into the whole spectrum of critical thinking approaches, and then on to what's basically the liberal arts e.g. philosophy, social sciences etc. as you desire. But the value you get from all of those things depends heavily on the framework you have for thinking about them going in.

Claiming random things are "fake news" would be a lot harder if people could work out what is and isn't fake by themselves!

[culturestate]

> I would start by simply putting everyone through a course in deductive reasoning at the earliest age possible

I was taught the explicit premise of deductive vs. inductive reasoning as part of our unit on the scientific method in, I think, fourth or fifth grade. I always assumed this was a standard curriculum module.

[Lwepz]

>I would start by simply putting everyone through a course in deductive reasoning at the earliest age possible

Indeed. This would help ensure people's brains' transition function is stable enough to perform faultless computation. We forget that our brains aren't wired for exact computation. They're wired to perform approximations of computation that are good enough for survival.

As a result, you end up with myriads students who go through the school system via memorization and emergent fuzzy computation.

They reach an adult age without possessing the cognitive tool-set to grasp the subtleties and nuances of the world they live in. The fact that such people are also preyed on by charlatans, ad companies and politicians(intersection of charlatans and ad companies) obviously doesn't help.