General scientific education should be focused on methodological scrutiny and skepticism.

Our biggest issue in general scientific literacy is in people being convinced by quacks, charlatans, and well intentioned incompetence.

I'll use examples to demonstrate the fix.

Let's start with a recent bogus claim: "vaccine causes biomagnetism"

The experiment people use is to stick a smooth magnetic object on their oily skin.

Let's see if this works using what we teach people

"collect data, ask questions about it, hypothesize some answers"

Those could lead people to conclude the biomagnetism theory. That's the problem.

Instead, scientific literacy needs to focus on scrutiny. Karl Popper style testing, verifying, falsifying, validating.

For example: trying to stick magnets to unvaccinated people or similar shaped non-magnets to either group, see if they respond to a compass, or use a piece of paper in between the skin and the magnet, or some talc to smooth the skin (Randi debunked human magnetism with this).

But instead, there's hundreds of videos of the smooth object on oily skin test followed by the conclusion that vaccines cause biomagnetism.

A friend of mine showed me an hour compilation of countless people repeating the same flawed experiment as if a larger quantity was a valid refutation of my methodological objections.

I watched it regardless. The same flawed experiment repeated. A large stream of commenters claimed this is what convinced them.

Why? What we teach in school won't help us identify how this is wrong. In fact, they're taught that repeatability is good, and it is, but it doesn't necessarily support a hypothesis without sufficient variation. That's Robert Boyle, 1600s.

That's why instead students should poke holes (or support) in increasingly difficult arguments as they progress through school.

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Second example, let's stick with vaccines because why not.

The hogwash: vaccines cause X.

The graphs are pretty convincing until you ask how things are defined, detected and the frequency of testing. Then everything is easily explained.

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Third example: homoeopaths. They pass all the current methods taught in school.

That's the reason medicine invented double blind studies, to show homoeopaths were nonsense. (See the salt tests of 1835 https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/articles/inventing-the-rand...)

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If students learned valid scrutiny and real scientific skepticism (not the sloppy hand waving nonsense that climate denying propagandists put out for instance) we'd have addressed climate change.

We'd have more effective social programs, better economic policy, not be wasteful as a society and not have half the people getting boondoggled by grifters and charlatans.

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Let me belabor the point with one final example. The extremely dangerous advice given by Norman Vincent Peale in his famous 1952 text, "The power of positive thinking". He uses the word "scientific" 40 times and produces exactly zero science beyond unverifiable anecdotes.

Some of his uses of "scientific" include "scientific use of prayer" and "spiritually scientific principles (used 3 times)".

He makes remarkable and totally unsubstantiated claims throughout the book on things such as clairvoyance, ESP, and just straight up magic such as miraculous healings and physically impossible events.

His techniques have actually led to severe psychological illness and many suicides. Translated into 42 languages, sold 15 million copies.

People seem to be on board, just like they kill their children with homeopaths and themselves because they refuse to take a vaccine that will supposedly make them magnetic.

What they've been taught is science backs them up on every one of these beliefs.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a problem here.