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Kenny comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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Since you brought up Dawkins, I think teaching about Memetics would be very useful in raising the "sanity waterline". Learning about Memetics really forces you to analyze your beliefs for selfish replicator ideas.
In addition, it challenges the view that consensus is an impregnable defense for believing bizarre things. You are put in the position of actually having to try to cite evidence for why you believe things. Of course even that doesn't work very often, since most people have very strong ideological immune systems that protect their beliefs. But asking those questions, and trying to justify your beliefs is a necessary first step.
Memes are at best a thought-provoking analogy - we have no way of being rigorous about them. I'd love to be wrong about this, but I'd be surprised.
What exactly do you mean by being "rigorous about them"?
Some seemingly 'rigorous' ways of studying memes that spring to mind:
It's not clear that memes are copied with a high enough degree of fidelity to really be subject to evolution by natural selection, but they certainly share the other structural characteristics of genes, namely variation and differential fitness.