Thank you for explaining your background; it is fascinating to me how people learn and how they feel about the process.

Perhaps critical thinking is not the phrase I am looking for. I would like kids to learn some kind of situational awareness. With phones and the Internet, everyone is now an "expert" on everything, except nobody ever looks at anything in depth. Particularly, how decisions are made where they live, locally, and where they live, globally. (Meaning, immediate surroundings/culture vs. national culture vs. global world.) Also, how those decisions/systems/procedures actually affect daily lives, tasks, environment.

That is very frustrating to me.

I agree with you that school is mainly rote learning/hoop jumping. I very much thought that through elementary/high school. But all of a sudden in college I got to see a lot more different people than in my town--it was refreshing, enjoyable. Likewise, I mostly thought my professors were full of it, but when they were good, like the best reading and literature, they gave me names and references that I certainly wouldn't have gotten elsewhere. And that likewise helped me feel more connected to other humans and history. I am a hardcore introvert and interact much more fully with books than I do with people--so being given the time and space to peruse books during my college career was an astounding gift to me.