I've no idea what they learn at school these days. In my day, I learned nothing . The level of education was abysmal. I was discussing this with a mate the other week and we concluded that the totality of our learning across secondary school could probably be fitted into an intensive two week period. Even at A level, aside from maths (we had a superb teacher for maths), our education consisted of being bombarded with dry facts and dictations regurgitated by people who literally didn't know what was coming out of their mouths. I remember our sixth-form physics class being 'instructed' to perform the Young's double slit experiment with no precursor or explanation. Once concluded we were told (pretty much verbatim) that 'This shows light behaves like a wave and like a particle, " then, "Any questions? OK, pack up and go quietly!" I turned to my mate and said, "What the **** was that ****?" It was a decade before I realised they had presented the most incredible experiment in human history as a stultifying, nonsensical parody of itself. The idea that we might have been taught to think is laughable. That's the last thing they wanted us to do.
Critical thinking exposes hypocrisy, injustice, and most of all incompetence.
Our best thinkers self-select into higher paid occupations. Engineering, Chemistry, law and business, medicine, ect. Not teaching.
Culturally we have made the idiotic decision to ignore IQ differences and pretend that morons can get "High School" diplomas.
"Smarter people get paid more, therefore: everyone is smart now". Well no, now you've destroyed the very purpose of a "High" school diploma. Now it is just toilet paper.
We group kids by age, not by their academic profiles. We promote them socially. Everyone gets a high school diploma as an attendance award.
So it means nothing, and no critical thinking skills are required to get one. Intelligent people are a threat in a classroom lead by a person from the lowest ACT/SAT college test cohort.
Our state came in 50th out of the 50 states in reading. The results came out this semester.
The teachers at our local school have "The Incredible Mr. Smith" and "Amazing Ms. Jones" on their classroom doors.
The scores for our state are 19th percentile internationally, using the PISA as a benchmark. Our local students are below the state average. So we are talking on the order of 15th percentile internationally. For our school.
The boys, even worse. The top students at our school, bad as they are: all girls. The only ones scoring "superior" in any subject through all grades tested are girls.
Let's see: one male teacher and no male administrators in the entire school.
We cannot apply critical thinking to that one, wow! Talk about the PC police coming out in force.
Our students are completely ignorant of their competitive condition, and telling them so exposes what a gigantic fraud the whole thing is. What a tragic waste of time for people with higher IQ's.
Once you have a rigorous reading/writing/math/science primary education you have already been introduced to logical thinking.
Organizing it as a special study can be done quite early for a higher-IQ person. Age 9 or 10, no problem for a bright kid. To learn logial fallacies. How to build arguments logically. Proof by contradiction, etc.