Nice article. A little dialogue if I may.
I am also a scientist but never touched being a clinician that forced me to say things to people that were not reasonably established in fact. As such, I'll bet you money you have made more money than me.
My solutions to the problems you describe are meant not just to repair and improve education but also to educate adults. I wrote a book on this "How to get your lies back" which goes into the computational cognitive neuroscience science of privacy, lies, and truth. Most of the important observations needed to understand the scientifically justifiable solutions can be confirmed by anyone even with just a lower school education.
Immediately after finishing and publishing my two books, my first activity was to find two places on the web where I could collect lies and I chose medium and twitter. Below is my first medium article (9-19) which summarizes, in a self-contained way, the science and major justifiable clinical application of it, to getting your (good) lies back.
Yes, it references another person of French descent...but in this case a much more famous scientist by far than either of us. Basically I'm saying he was right when he philosophized some things and changed the world. He is the one person often credited (including by the Durants) as the Father of the Age of Reason...He brought us modern science (demanding replication) and the rules of evidence in law (demanding proof of truth). 50 years before Sir Isaac Newton, a mere Brit:
Here is how your brain works. Now pretty much completely and not an opinion, but established fact in the last decade or so. As well as other evidence we have known for thousands of years but never quite noticed in cognitive neuroscience..
https://medium.com/liecatcher/how-your-brain-computes-41ebe7428ff9
I substantly disagree with you about math. Are you familiar with the work by the psychologist John R. Anderson at CMU. It's just taught wrong.
But in my humble opinion Youtube is largely fixing that. We need to accredit the good Youtubes so people know the ones that tell the truth. Here is an article that shows Feynman at his best. Openly admitting he did not understand why some students find math hard to learn. And explaining why. It's in the context of my very serious scientific claim that Physicists are the best liars ... and Physics is just another cult, like most of the serious sciences and other scholarly disciplines relying on careful, replicable, observation.
You might see one M. Curie in the picture for this article:
https://medium.com/liecatcher/physicists-are-the-best-liars-c8e9ccfcf6b4
However, it is just an opinon that people should place more trust scientists of French descent. In the School of Computer Science at CMU, where we see many students with (unbelievably) perfect SAT or GRE scores, I long argued, and have been proven right, that people who excel easily are not our greatist social capital contributors. It's the ones that struggle A LOT but never give up. Measure that. And assume your education is failing when your students give up and stop trying.
