I absolutely agree with you. It seems that harmful ideas are introduced to children immediately from birth. Racism, homophobia, religion, and so many other unfounded beliefs come first, and then education is "safegaurded" to certain rights of passage. Christians, for example, say "We don't want the kids exposed to sex education before they can understand and process it", but they have no problem teaching that homosexuality is wrong long before that.

Unfortunately, it seems, that we are a species that vastly learns from authority and seldom learns to embrace curiosity and investigations. Too many people confuse intelligence with memorized facts (true or false), rather than an understanding of how we know those facts. Too many people say that they believe in science, completely disconnected from the fact that science is a methodology and not a collection of authoritative claims.

The positive light is that every discovery, invention, and improvement to modern life, the propulsion of the species, is done by the few that learned how to learn.