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Fair enough, but with a little bit of updating from what was mainstream news, one could have easily updated his model that covid isn't as potent as chemical weapons, given that very early on we knew that prolonged indoor mass gatherings of people with covid positive people only had a fraction of the people actually catching the virus, rest assured if you dropped a chemical weapon everyone in the building and possibly the neighborhood would be dead/hospitalized. So initially covid is somewhere between as deadly as nothing and {chemical weapon}, Then onwards it would have taken a month or two of updating from just watching the news and observing anecdata to arrive at a reasonable assessment of how deadly covid really is.
No dispute that it's possible for some people to have come to the conclusion that outdoor masking is silly, from multiple lines of evidence.
My point would be that expecting any mass schooling system to create the ability to do this in most of its students is an unrealistic expectation. Broadly diffused critical thinking, scientific intuitions, learning how to learn, etc. can't be the basis for how society makes decisions, because people are really, really bad at those things. Best case scenario is that elite channels have the ability to drive mass behavior, and that the behaviors they drive are in fact good ones.
What's the role for schooling, then? Teaching basic academic skills (reading, arithmetic) necessary for success in life and giving rules of thumb that when followed will lead to good lives, while identifying exceptional students and tracking them to places where they can be most useful.
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