I do not teach children, I give them joy. Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion.
All children feel it.
Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience. School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.